“I’ve had better haircuts, but never cheaper or faster…”
But: I have been a Realtor for nearly twenty years, a broker/owner for fifteen. I have sold a few hundred homes and overseen or advised on the sale of hundreds of others. I have met with or spoken to thousands of customers, making hundreds of them my clients or tenants to the rental homes we manage. I am my only agent for now – I sub out anything that does not require a license – but, with my wife Cathleen on board or without her, we have always been scrupulous about fairness – not just fair-housing but fair-dealing as such. I hate predators. I never want to be one.
So what is my experience of actual, specific, objectively-real racism in real estate?
I once had an out-of-town investor in my car who said things I considered red flags, so I drove him back to his hotel. This is the same thing I do with irrationally optimistic investors – except I’ve met dozens of them.
Want more? When I first started, working as an apartment locator, I had a very racist elderly black woman as a client, but I just laughed at the things she said – and in the end she found a new place without me.
I have one more: We used to use a centrally-located Fidelity office for most of our title work. In those days, that was the “Spanish” office, the one where all deals that were to close in Spanish were sent. Over the years, I saw several contracts fall apart on Friday afternoons, with the whole family coming down to sign, only to find out that no one, until then, had told them what their monthly payment would be and how much cash they needed to close. Not just no new house – instantly homeless. Was that a fair-housing issue or just ineptitude on the part of their Realtors and lenders? Very sad, in any case.
But: That’s it. That is the entirety of my personal, first-hand experience with anything like actual racism in real estate. Moreover, I have not heard any first-hand war stories about racist Realtors or lenders, either from my own clients or other agents. Most words spoken about racism seem to refer the “systemic” kind – non-personal, non-first-hand, non-actual, non-specific, non-measurable, non-objectively-real – ultimately imaginary- or at-best imagined-racism.
I’m sure there are counter-examples, but I don’t care. If you can’t produce dozens of prima facie examples – from the past 30 days – there is no systemic problem. To the extent there are any topical problems, I’d bet they owe more to heuristics – shortcuts – than to racial animus. As above, actual racists are hard to miss, where actual real estate agents are most likely to be biased toward the highest, safest, soonest closing. That aligns listing agents’ interests with their sellers’ but buyer’s agents against their buyers’ interests, with the result that less-qualified buyers in general will tend to get poorer treatment.
The solution, underserved clients? Shop around. You need a hungrier agent.
We are fools to insult ourselves and the real estate community as such. We are not racist as a society in America, and we are not racists as individuals in the real estate business. I know I am not, and I know of no one – NO ONE – who is.
