Let the good times roll!

Properties that have gone into foreclosure have become hot sellers...The sales increase, at least here in the Bay Area, is largely driven by bargain hunters, jumping into the market, scooping up distressed properties. [Here voice gets snippy.] That's good news for Realtors but not so good for the many struggling Americans trying to keep their home from becoming the next hot seller.

I don't know if it's the recession, or the rain [yes, I wrote this in February], or the lack of rain, or the real estate market, or what, but lately I've been talking back to my TV. Especially when it tries to teach me big ol' complicated things. Especially when it tries to reach the inner yahoo it knows lurks in each of us.

At least I haven't shot my TV, which should prove that I'm not Elvis. But talking back to a consumer durable is enough to raise a few eyebrows in my household, so when I took issue with Laura Anthony's tone the other night my wife gave me that I-wish-he'd-take-a-vacation look.

"Yeah, right", I'd muttered. "Take another cheap shot at agents. Make it 'Realtors versus decent God-fearing Americans' again. Like we're rolling in dough selling $300,000 bank-owned homes formerly owned by widows and orphans and loving every minute of it! Bring us more bank-owned homes! More! MORE! MORE!!!

As if it isn't bad enough that the only part of the market that's selling consistently these days is bank-owned $300,000 homes that take more work to sell than $2,000,000 homes and pay just enough to get you to the next bank-owned $300,000 home.

As if it isn't bad enough that real estate is so slow that full-time agents are going part-time or leaving the business altogether.

As if it isn't bad enough that agents have to go in like HazMat units to clean up the toxic mess the mortgage banking industry left, just so it can treat us like moral lepers.

As if it isn't bad enough that I'm dealing with REO agents who act like they used to be mall security guards.

As if it isn't bad enough that all I look at these days are homes so drenched in the pathos of broken dreams and $55,000,000 corporate jets that they make One Life To Live look like Laugh-In.

But wait a second, what about the cleaning lady an agent in your office told you about, the woman who quit paying her mortgage eight months ago because her condo's lost value and she figures the lender doesn't deserve her money anymore? Or what about that car salesman who told you his mother pulled a cool $100k out of her home and then talked her lender into letting her sell it for less than the loan balance. Hmm???

As if it isn't bad enough that I'm dealing with banks who stack the deck in their favor with booby-trapped Seller's Addendums that I get the distinct impression few other buyer's agents read, fewer still understand and fewer still take seriously. And when you do take those booby traps seriously, like the true professional you like to think you are, you're accused of "making things too complicated".

As if it isn't bad enough that there are people out there who think that banks will even look at, let alone consider, let alone respond to, let alone accept, offers 30 to 50 percent below list price. The banks' asset managers have big shredders and they know how to use them.

As if it isn't bad enough that the same media whose opportunistic reporting hyped the boom far more shamelessly Let Real Estate Make You Rich! We Show You How! than the NAR ever did is the same media now squatting on the moral high ground, the very same media blessed with one of the Ten Most Recession-Proof! and fundamentally least honest jobs around, scaring the living cr— hey! this is a family Web site! excuse me the living daylights out of viewers while pretending to know what it's talking about.

As if it isn't bad enough that I can sit in a room with 600 other salespeople and wonder why I let a lack of aptitude for math, science and spatial relationships stand in the way of a career in engineering.

Obviously this silent diatribe had to end, or I'd end up shooting out all the streetlights in my neighborhood with the high-powered handgun I don't own. And then, the next morning, I get a providential email that does an instant attitude adjustment.

One of my email buddies is an agent way out on the Canadian prairie who's distantly related and found me when she Googled our family name. Try it and you'll see that I'm the closest thing to a celebrity the Fytens have. We've never met, but we email from time to time, and she's sent me photos of her family, folks who radiate prairie decency and make me want to move far north. She looks about forty, has a strapping son who looks about twenty and a father of seventy who looks a lot like my grandfather on the other side of my family.

She's always been upbeat, but now the market has hit a rough patch where she lives too, and that, plus the hard winter they have up there, has her down. She complains that the press reports only bad news, so the locals are hunkering down instead of buying real estate even though the economy up there, driven by sky-high oil prices, is still good.

She has a few other things on her plate too. An old friend from school is dying, and she mentions in passing that at least he'll have time to say good-bye, something her husband didn't have, and I realize that this young woman lost her husband, suddenly, and it hits me that her life as I'd imagined it, a prosperous agent secure in an idyllic prairie town, might not be all I thought it was. In fact, I find out she's never been sure she likes selling real estate, and that she's thinking of getting into something with more stability—any stability.

Good to hear from you, and I think I know how you feel. I was just wondering yesterday whether it was the weather or the market or me. There's no doubt that in times like these real estate can be a tough "why do I bother getting out of bed?" business.

As for the reporting, an appraiser I talked to last Saturday said it best: "Those morons". But they're giving people what they want. Most of us seem to want to hear bad news, want to hear the worst, maybe because we like the adrenaline rush of running scared, but also I think because we need to know where life is going, and hearing "things are going to hell in a hand basket" is more concrete and therefore more reassuring than the truth: "beats the heck out of me".

In times like these it's just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, going to the office every day or working from home or talking to potential clients, doing whatever makes you feel useful and connected.

You have to keep going through the motions as if they mean something, because they do. That way you'll be around when real estate comes back, as it always does. And it'll be worth it to be around then because we do good work, you and I.

Right or wrong, profound or deluded, it's the best advice I can give anyone, in real estate or not.