THE BEST HISTORY OF REAL ESTATE EVER
By becki February 20, 2014
The earliest history of the real estate industry was recorded in cave drawings. The reported history started with a couple of open houses involving cave-maker jezebels who sent the Homo Fabulous from the tribe out to find the perfect pelts while opening their “caves” to tribal Homo Erectus, but those stories are vicious rumors. The average cave cost 7 pelts.**
In reality, the first open house in American was probably in Levittown, New York in 1947. Sortafacts** reveals that the initial open house attempt was a flop because the attendees were all neighbors who lived in the exact replica house down the street. Several years later an ingenious agent decided that sneaking out of the office and into someone’s home might give the edge on capturing prospects. Early pros were amazed at what they learned when they actually walked through someone’s house…and paid attention. This method proved to be very effective, as holding open houses became the most popular weekend activity for anyone with a scuffed briefcase and a comb-over. The average home cost about $13,000.
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Long before the Levittown discovery, there was the infamous 1890 failed attempt to start a national real estate association. It is not without a dose of irony that in the very same year the first used car lot opened in Catskill, New York.
In 1900, over 75% of Americans had the audacity to choose not to own a home. However, by 1908 The National Association of Real Estate Exchanges was founded to “unite the real estate men of America with the purpose of effectively exerting a combined influence of matters affecting real estate interests”. According to Sortafacts, the subtext of the Association bylaws indicated that the exchange provided an opportunity for these men to explain to their mothers that they were just as important as their brother, the lawyer.
1913 was a big year in the history of real estate. The Federal Reserve Bank was created, providing doomsday prophets with a chance to hone their prognostication skills with interest rate predictions. The term, Realtor, was first muttered and within two years the first fight broke out over the common pronunciation of reel-ah-tur. The first minimum wage law took effect (yay, Oregon), the first prize was inserted into a box of Crackerjacks, and the 16th Amendment passed, allowing the government to collect income tax. Coincidence? You be the judge.
In 1921 puffs were blown into the nation’s first real estate bubble and police in Pennsylvania issued an edict requiring women to wear no puffy skirts (or any skirts for that matter) unless they were at least 4 inches below the knee. By 1926 the little black skirt was introduced, the real estate bubble had burst, there was a steep rise in the foreclosure rate, and the housing market officially sucked. Many were quick to blame the typical scapegoat trifecta of easy credit, consumer expectation of continued high prices, and advertiser promotion of the glory of home ownership. The olden days were so quaint.
In 1937, the Washington Daily News became the first US newspaper to insert a perfumed advertising page and the search for “new house smell” became a scratch-n-sniff frenzy. San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened and after World War II the United States military offloaded thousands of dishonorably discharged gay servicemen into San Francisco’s Castro District thus creating the first “appreciation through gayification” real estate policy in the country.
By 1950 the term “Realtor” was registered as a trademark and the first real estate franchise was established. “I’m a people person,” became de rigueur and women began to join the ranks of Realtors in record numbers. Silly Putty was invented and Mildred Ella “Babe” Didrikson-Zaharias putted all over the place winning LPGA tournaments after retiring from excelling in every sport ever created and before being crowned the greatest woman athlete of the century. Contrary to wishful thinking, Babe was not a Realtor, but she loved her sensible shoes.
In 1960 a new home cost about $12,700 and by 1969 the median sales price of a home in the US was about $25,000.*** National Association of Real Estate Boards created a national multiple listing system (with more than a 40-year head start on Zillow). In 1960 the birth control pill was approved the by the FDA and by 1969 the first electronic babysitter, Sesame Street, first aired. Women continued to join the ranks of Realtors in record numbers.
nadia-2014
Five years after the first urine-colored jackets were donned by polyester-lovin’ executives at a large, global real estate firm, the Council of Residential Specialists was founded, to compensate for the pesky problem that real estate agents didn’t need much in the way of formal edukashun*. That same year, Nadia Comaneci was the first to earn several perfect scores of 10 in gymnastics. Relevant? Perhaps not, but it was pretty cool and several people have said that she kind of looks like a real estate agent.
During the 1980s, interest rates soared to over 18%, and hearing real estate pros ask, “Do you want fries with that?” became 73% more common than, “Would you like to make an offer?”** In 1984 Michael Jackson was burned during filming for a Pepsi commercial and a year later the New Coke was released (ultimately lasting only one year less than Michael Jackson’s 1994 marriage to Lisa Marie Presley). Among the coke-snorting crowd, deregulations gave Savings and Loans a free pass to make many stupid real estate loans as they completely forgot the Savings part of their identity. Once the hole in the ozone layer was discovered in 1985, many understood where those funds had gone. Pepsi premiered Madonna’s Like A Prayer as a commercial form of thanking Coke for being such idiots in the Cola Wars and by 1989, over half of the Savings and Loans had failed, along with the fund that was created to insure their deposits.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and a few years later industries other than real estate had started to embrace the internet. Realtors were still loading their Lexus SC300s with fat real estate listing books and card files of leads when, in 1992, Glengarry Glen Ross became the most famous real estate company to offer prizes for closing real estate sales. The first price was a Cadillac Eldorado, the second prize was a set of steak knives, and the third prize was…”You’re fired.”
Alec Baldwin on what it takes to sell real estate
Alec Baldwin on what it takes to sell real estate
homes NAR
The unexplained dip in the real estate market in the weeks leading up to October of 1995 has recently been attributed to the many real estate agents who were gathered around their televisions in order to see if the glove did indeed fit**. Although a small percentage of real estate professionals even noticed that real estate listings were starting to creep onto the the internet, once Al Gore explained his invention in his 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, the whole internet thing really started to catch on in the real estate industry. By then Yahoo had purchased GeoCities for $3.6 billion and technology had answered the prayers of the real estate industry…but perhaps not Yahoo’s.
During the early 2000s, as real estate pros grabbed their Palms then Visors then Zires then Tungstens then Treos then Centros then Blackberrys, many were so busy selling homes that many didn’t notice the technology companies creeping in to claim their stake in the boom. Most technology company executives were glad that their investors were satisfied enough to see the word “dot-com” on the end of the company name, and didn’t stop to ask what the hell the technologists knew about the real estate industry…other than having bought an expensive house in anticipation of an IPO.
Dot-com's furry little failure
Dot-com’s furry little failure
In 2004, The Donald filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, US home ownership peaked at over 69%, and the mortgage loan-to-value ratios hovered around 100% (when HELOCs were involved this ratio often crept to 120%). Between 2004 and 2006, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchased $434 billion in securities backed by subprime loans.
By the time most analysts claimed that the housing bubble had burst, it already had. Big time. Early online evidence that indicated incorrect expert predictions were quickly erased from online profiles and justifications became bloodsport. By mid 2007, 83% of the CEOs of real estate technology companies established during the real estate boom had listed the company massage chairs, pingpong tables and kegerators on CraigsList, and they were living in their parents’ basement.**
By the end of 2007, the number of foreclosures filed was up by 75% from 2006. Many real estate professionals heard the term short-sale and distressed property for the first time. By 2009, the trademark was filed for Certified Distressed Property Expert™. Certification came with a box of Kleenex.
Many of us remember where we were in 2009 when we heard that Michael Jackson died, but how many of us realized that when Donald Trump declared bankruptcy for the third time that same year, he wasn’t done? Flipping real estate technology companies became more common than flipping houses and the statistical success of house flipping only slightly outstripped the average rate of success of real estate app/tech companies. Certainly none of us can accurately count the number of vital, disruptive, real estate industry-changing technologies and applications that no longer exist, but early research has the number in the ENO category (Embarrassing-Number-Of).** Perhaps this more current list of top 50 real estate technology companies from Housing Wire will be nice for a good old-fashioned game of whack-a-mole?
By 2011, the real estate market had officially sucked for 5 years. Over 93% of real estate experts agreed that the market would get better sometime in the future but that, in their expert opinion, it was a challenging time. Arab Spring sprung, Fukushima leaked, Osama Ben Laden was killed and, since over 4 million homes had been lost to foreclosure, the hottest camping spot in America was Zucotti Park in New York City.
Real estate clients and customers armed themselves with tons of never-before-shared data. They called, texted or emailed their trusted real estate agent (or the one that popped up on the real estate portal) when they were ready (or when DYI went awry). The first test tube baby turned 35-years old and she conceived her first home naturally.
In 2013, real estate inventory shrunk and prices started to climb. Real estate agents began to discuss big data and accuracy concerns as the threat to reveal their production came closer to reality. Some clients cared. Most did not.
Tech companies attempted to sell products that would implant the Internet of Things deep into all we do and to own the data in order to sell it back to paying real estate agents and others. In 2014, technology companies invested in social, mobile, big data, paperless, ecosystems, quantifiable stuff, predictive analytics, full real estate lifestyles and cycles, incubation, 3-D printing, and crowdfunding. Many real estate professionals chatted about the same topics with their online besties all the while thinking that they should consider learning Mandarin. Other busy real estate professionals embraced technology like it was going out of style (because it generally was) and continued to use non-virtual connections like old-timey town criers.
The markets fluctuated.
http://arousingthebuycurious.com/2014/02/20/history-real-estate/
