This year mark’s my 30th year as a licensed NC real estate agent. As you would expect, much has changed in our industry. For the younger agents, what you will read below will make very little sense.
For the rest of us, the changes we’ve seen in the last 30 years in the wonderful world of real estate will quickly serve as a wakeup call that we’ve been in this business a really long time!
Come with me as we take a stroll down memory lane and see if you are familiar with the 15 sure signs you’ve been in the real estate business for many, many years!
1. You know you’ve been in real estate too long if you remember using a real metal key to open a lock box.
Image compliments of Los Angeles Realtor Phyllis Harb
2. You know you’ve been in real estate too long if you remember riding around with six months worth of MLS books in the trunk of your car.
3. You know you’ve been in real estate too long if you have fond memories of simpler times with agency relationships. Remember the days when everyone represented the seller and there were no such things as buyer representation and dual agency.
4. You know you’ve been in real estate to long if while on floor time you would write handwritten notes, and letters to FSBO’s and expired listings.
5. You know you’ve been in real estate to long if you remember telling sellers it was time to replace the orange shag carpet, and the flocked wallpaper in the bath room.
And the avocado green appliances have to go.
Flickr Image Creative Commons Husqvarna Green Stove by Maureen Didde
6. You know you’ve been in real estate too long if your tried and true tool for cold calling was a reverse lookup phone directory.
7. You know you’ve been in real estate too long if you know what the term “FHA bushes” means.
8. You know you’ve been in real estate too long if you pine for the days when an offer to purchase and contract was only one page long.
9. You know you’ve been a real estate too long if you remember using a company radio. Agents would call in to our office and ask the duty agent to phone the listing agent’s firm to request a showing all while sitting in front of a listing.
10. You know you’ve been in real estate too long if you remember writing ads for your listing for the newspaper.
11. You know you’ve been a real estate too long if you remember that it was cool to be the first agent to have your name on the sign rider.
12. You know you’ve been in real estate too long if you recall the female real estate agents having “big hair.”
13. You know you’ve been in real estate too long if you remember when agents created “CD’s” to market their services! By the way, local Raleigh Realtor, Linda Craft and I started our real estate careers with the same firm and in the same year, 1985!
14. You know you’ve been in real estate too long if you remember when you had to place the phone in the cradle of the dialup modem to logon to the MLS computer to upload a listing.
15. You know you’ve been in real estate too long if you remember having a fear that the Internet was going to replace you as a real estate agent. And to think some agents have the same concerns today about “ZTR.”
What fond memories do you have from days of old in real estate?
Until next time,
Bobby
I do remember a lot of these, especially the old modem, but I wasn’t a realtor when I was using it, I worked for a retailer “Service Merchandise” based out of Nashville, and we used these to communicate with the store to retrieve daily sales and inventory information. I didn’t become a realtor until 2003, and internet age was just getting started for real estate.