The Art and Science of Love
11
Adoration
REAL ESTATE is a tricky business. The old joke is that an agent spends his commission three times—once when he gets a client, once when he makes the sale, and once when he gets the check. As a result, most are behind in the earnings game. I learned early on to live within my means. That was more of my father’s teaching. He sat down in a very businesslike way and pointed out that as an agent, I had no monthly paycheck to depend on. Therefore, when I made my first sale, I needed to consider it my income for the year and budget accordingly.
Now, each January, I determine what my budget is for the rest of the year and put my commissions in the bank to cover the months when there are none. In spite of the recent real estate collapse, I’d done pretty well for the past fifteen years. That included making sure my accounts were all balanced for the year before taxes were due.
The inevitable fall slow-down had begun early. I had closings well into October, but by November 1, my inventory was low and the prospects for listing were decreasing. It was time to ‘fill the pipeline,’ in real estate parlance. That meant getting clients on board so as soon as the weather breaks in the late winter, we have houses going on the market. Occasionally we get a mid-winter bonus.
That’s what happened when I listed the Morrison house. Ed Morrison had accepted a transfer with his company and was moving out East. He’d found housing there and the family planned to move after the winter holiday. Most folks don’t like to move their kids in the middle of a school year, but the Morrisons were more concerned about keeping their family together than keeping it in one place. If Ed was going to be in Pennsylvania, then so were the rest of them.
It was a good house, too. I paid for the appraisal myself before setting the marketing plan. I’d negotiated with Ed regarding the initial asking price and we’d decided that going over a million would be a killer in this market, so we settled on $949,000. I already knew they would take as much as fifteen percent less than the ask but the trick would be moving the house during the holidays.
As it happened, the office got its normal fall class of freshman real estate agents, fresh out of the necessary classes and newly licensed. Dan, my broker, was holding the licenses and wondering how many of them would still be in the business by spring. I’ve known Dan since I entered the industry myself. He’s a good guy, if a little crude at times. Seems he’s always interested in figuring out who the cutest new agent is and then getting it on with her. It’s always a little sad when we look at four new agents and know only one of them will still be with us at this time next year.
“How about we do something new for this class,” I suggested. “You know I just landed the Morrison house with a full seven percent commission attached. You and I don’t really need that commission as much as these newbies need a sale. Here’s what I propose. Let’s make the full commission a six-way split if the house sells inside the agency before the first of the year. That will put six of us on the line for marketing, getting prospects, and holding opens. If any of us can get it sold by Christmas, we’ll each walk away with one percent and the lucky person who closes the deal will get two percent. Everybody wins.”
“Except me,” Dan groused. “You’ll be within half a percent of what you would get as the listing agent anyway. I’m giving up two-and-a-half percent for the benefit of these kids.”
“Mmm. Jackie is no kid, if you noticed. She’s a good bit older than me. But think of what it would mean if they all got a payoff for working together. We could have more than one of them still with us by June.”
“I’m not saying ‘no.’ I’m just making sure you know who is really paying for your noble idea. You get to set everything up. They are now officially your mentorees.”
I wasn’t sure that was a word. I’d had a really good year, not the least of which was helped along by my lovely assistant Rita and the new style of painting I was doing. Nothing to do with real estate but it made me feel good. I called our four new agents together and laid out the proposal to them. The first thing they wanted to know was what was wrong with the house that I was willing to give up part of my commission to get rid of it. I explained the situation as best I could without sounding too altruistic. The truth was I’d been contemplating getting my broker’s license and setting up on my own. It was even on my goals sheet for this year. It would pay me personally if I knew there was some bright talent willing to go with me. I couldn’t really say anything about that to either the agents or to Dan. Instead, I said there weren’t many houses to practice on during the holiday season and I was on a personal project that would limit my time. I let them know I’d run dry on ideas to market the place during the holiday season and would like some fresh, untainted input.
Just putting out that much of a suggestion deflected the questions from my motives and people started tossing out ideas for marketing the house. I suggested a field trip and everyone packed up to go look at the house. I decided to let them brainstorm a little more and didn’t go with them. Instead, I headed back home to my studio. There was something nagging at the back of my mind.
My team of rookies came into the conference room looking extremely proud of themselves Friday. They’d spent the entire week researching and writing their marketing plan. Dan and I sat in the room and waited for them to get organized. Alan took the lead.
“We are launching in a single big event weekend,” he started. “Our goal is one hundred visitors to a triple open house, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend.”
I saw Dan drop his head and I shook mine vigorously. There was so much wrong with this idea.
“Oh no. It’s a holiday. We’re talking about Black Friday. Everyone is out shopping. Who’s going to come to an open house?”
“Exactly,” Alan said, as if I’d just figured out their strategy. He reminded me a lot of what I was like when I started in real estate. He was young—in his twenties—determined, and energetic without the manic tone that so many young real estate agents get. I’d once had a twenty-six-year-old agent come to me so hyper I thought he was on drugs. He spoke so fast and so excitedly that he sprayed my desk with saliva and I backed my chair as far away as possible. Alan, however, was intense but not out of control. Even as a new agent, he was also working on his MBA. I waited to hear him out.
“We want to hold the opens on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings.”
“Evenings?” This was getting worse all the time.
“Yes. Here’s the plan. The Morrison House is in exclusive Holly Park, a gated community that makes holding open houses difficult because there is no drive-by traffic and people can’t get into the community.” I nodded. That was one of the major problems of market exclusive homes. Typically, one couldn’t use open houses.
“Except, on four weekends a year,” Jackie took over. “Holly Park is known for having the best holiday decorations and light display in our region. They open the gates and allow traffic through on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Hundreds of cars come through the community on carefully routed one-way streets. So, our proposal is to extend the opening weekend of the lighting displays into the inside of the Morrison house. If we can get ten percent of the visitors to stop and tour the house, we’ll have over 100 potential buying parties. That’s over ten times the number that come to a normal open house.”
“What about traffic considerations?” I asked. I was beginning to warm to the idea but could see a huge traffic backup if people were parking instead of driving by.
“I checked with the president of the neighborhood association and with the local police,” Bob said. He was about 30 and had knocked about after high school, not having high enough grades to get a college acceptance that he could afford. After working in various warehouses and a season or two doing construction, he went back to get an AA degree at the local community college. He followed that with the training to get a real estate license. He was a big guy and built like a rock. He was a little intimidating for real estate sales, but once you got to know him, you saw he had a rather sweet personality. “The police send a contingent of volunteers out that keep things moving while the gates are open. All streets are one-way during the tour hours. You enter at one gate and leave at the other. The Morrisons have a big circular drive with enough width to park on one side and pass on the other. We’re thinking we hire a couple of high school kids to direct traffic in the driveway and make sure no one drives in if there are no spaces available. That will help keep the inside traffic manageable as well. We realize not everyone will get to see the house, but even if they don’t it might drive calls for appointments during the daytime.”
“I see this bringing in a lot of looky-loos and not many qualified buyers. Any plan for that?”
“A leaflet campaign in other affluent neighborhoods, including other residents in Holly Park,” Alan said. “We’ll also promote the decoration tour at the Executive Club and to several corporate headquarters in the region with an exclusive invitation to tour the Morrison house. We’ve also decided to greet people at the door and do a quick qualification and collection of names and addresses before they are allowed to follow the plastic-lined path, which is also a one-way route. That way we can keep people moving and have people stationed every so often to keep an eye on things and make sure nothing disappears.”
I looked at Dan and he had a kind of half-grin on his face. He just raised an eyebrow at me. It was my show.
“It sounds like you’ve thought this out well as a team. Ron, I haven’t heard anything from you yet. What are the downsides?” Ron was a quiet guy and I figured it was possible everyone else might have just railroaded him with the idea. He always dressed in a conservative suit, white shirt, and tie that made him look older than he was. I guessed barely twenty-one or twenty-two tops.
“I can’t work evenings on the weekend,” he said softly. “It’s family time. I went into real estate so I could set a reasonable schedule that would let me spend time with my wife and little girl. I think the ideas the group has put together are good, but I can’t participate. I’m going to have to withdraw from the group and try to make it on my own.”
“Hey, Ron,” Jackie said. “We don’t want to lose you on the team. Heck, half this idea was yours. Why didn’t you tell us you couldn’t do the evening things?”
“It all seems like such a good idea,” Ron answered. “And after I brought up a suggestion, I couldn’t very well shoot it down. I planned to do Saturday work, like I agreed with my wife, but I never thought about the evening thing.”
“You are all going to be shot after spending so much time at the house in the evening. Consider putting Ron on phone duty in the afternoons to answer questions and set appointments for private tours. The best prospects want another showing,” I said. “I don’t see any reason an evening limitation should prevent full participation on the team.”
“I agree,” Bob said. Jackie and Alan nodded. From there on, the event had a life of its own. These guys had a heap of work to do before they could open the doors at the Morrisons’, and they needed to recruit some other workers for the event.
I was invited to spend Thanksgiving with Rita at her grandmother’s house next door. Miriam, the grandmother, greeted me with a smile.
“There’s really no sense in pretending you two are just next door neighbors,” she said. “If you are going to act like family, I’m going to treat you like family. Now come in and open a bottle of wine.” I gave her a quick hug and kiss on the cheek. When I entered the kitchen, I was greeted by Tina, Rita’s younger sister. Not alike at all!
Tina’s husband, Rick, was in the living room with the television on and the Macy’s parade entertaining their six-month old baby. Tina had married her high school sweetheart, supported him through college and then settled down to raise a family. Rick had graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and went straight to work for a software development company. I’d sold them their first home. Tina was still carrying a bit of extra weight from the baby, but she’d never been thin. She was designed and built from the ground up to be a mother.
“Doc, it’s great to see you again. We love our house!” Tina said. I think she’d said that every time I’d casually passed her when she visited her grandmother. “We redid the nursery just before Rachel arrived. She loves it. Especially the rocking chair. I spend hours in there reading to her.”
“I’m glad the house is suiting your needs. I think you got a good buy on it.”
“Yes. It will be fine to get us through number two, but we’ll need to get a bigger house before we have more babies after that.” I guess Rita was spot on when she suggested she’d leave the breeding to her sister. It sounded like Tina intended to have enough for both of them. I grabbed the corkscrew and opened one of the bottles of wine I’d brought. Tina set three glasses on the counter for me to pour and went back to tossing a Caesar salad.
“Um… Five adults, Tina? Who’s not having wine?”
“Oh, Rick and I don’t drink alcohol. Never have. I joined the Mormon church before we were married so we could marry in the temple. We prohibit alcohol and are discouraged from drinking coffee or tea. I still drink tea to be sociable,” she said. “I don’t mind, though. You all can have wine and coffee. It doesn’t bother me.”
That explained a lot. I knew the LDS church was reputed to be a great place to raise children and encouraged married couples to bear fruit. I’d look forward to getting Tina and Rick a new house as their family grew.
Rita looked into the kitchen. “There you are! Has my evil sister seduced you away from me?” she asked.
“Rita! What a terrible thing to say. I’m quite happy with what I have, thank you,” Tina reprimanded her.
We clinked our glasses together and I said, “Here is to everyone being happy with what they have. Cheers!”
Later in the day, I saw Tina, Rick, and little Rachel cuddled on the sofa as she fed the baby from a generous tit. I wished I had a sketchbook with me, but I snapped a mental photograph. It was a picture of pure love. The baby looked up into the eyes of her mother as she suckled, an expression of adoration on her face.
“Are you looking at my sister’s tits?” Rita whispered. She nudged me with an elbow and I pulled her into my lap.
“No. The baby. The family. I need to sketch.”
“Okay. I’ll be by after a while.” She stood up and pulled me up by the hand. “Doc has a huge event this weekend and needs to go prepare for it.”
“Thank you for a lovely Thanksgiving together,” I said. Miriam reached up to give me a hug.
“Any time, Doc. You are always welcome.”
I sketched.
By the time Rita stopped by, I had a canvas on the easel and was laying in the washes. She brought me a turkey sandwich and fixed a fresh pot of coffee for me. Then she disappeared.
It was a smaller canvas than some of my more recent paintings, just twenty by twenty inches. And it was a closer view that I’d carefully cropped in my mind. The focus was on the baby. And the breast. I couldn’t have one without the other. No other faces entered the picture. It was Tina’s breast and Rick’s hand touched the baby’s head. Otherwise, it was a portrait of Rachel, the little girl who looked at her parents adoringly. Adoration. That was the title.
I worked all night. That was becoming a common theme when I entered this painting trance. Rita brought me breakfast and fresh coffee. She stared at the nearly completed painting. There were no fancy techniques or trance-induced flinging of paint in this portrait. I just tried to capture the moment of intense love. The baby concealed the nipple in her mouth and most of the areola. Her little hand patted the breast she suckled. I’d painted detail that I didn’t remember seeing when I watched the scene. The freckles across the top of Tina’s breast. The slightly crooked index finger of Rick’s right hand. A curl of Rachel’s nearly black hair, plastered against her ear. A spit-up cloth tossed over Tina’s right shoulder. It was all in the painting, along with the intensity of the six-month-old little girl.
I lay my brushes aside and put an arm around Rita. She sniffled and I saw tears running down her cheek.
“My sister is so lucky,” she whispered.
I’d discussed the plan with the Morrisons and they approved it whole-heartedly. So much so that they went all out to decorate, inside and outside the house. It was truly a showpiece. We carefully laid plastic runners along the path people were to follow when touring the home. Even as tired as I was after painting all night, I was there with the four rookie agents, preparing the house for showing all afternoon. Mrs. Morrison and her daughter were so enthused they baked cookies all afternoon. The aroma of the decorated cookies and a crock pot of hot spiced cider wafted from the kitchen where people could pause in their tour to talk to one of the agents. It was a festive atmosphere all around. The Morrisons left the house just before five so they didn’t have to witness the crowds descend.
It was a bit slow for the first hour before it was fully dark. Every house in the exclusive neighborhood was lit up with holiday cheer. I guessed many of the displays had been purchased from and installed by professionals. As high as my opinion of the Morrisons was, I couldn’t imagine that many people in their class would do so much work without hiring someone. Call me a cynic.
By six o’clock, there was a non-stop stream of people pulling into the driveway and touring the house. The numbers began to taper off by nine and at nine-thirty, we closed the drive and refused any more new guests admittance. At ten, the last guest left and the Morrisons returned to their home. We were all tired and I told the crew I’d see them the next day. When I got home, Rita was there to relax me and sleep cuddled next to me.
What a wonderful assistant!
After three days, we’d hosted two hundred buying parties, maybe five hundred individuals. For our purposes, we were interested in the groups, not the individuals. If a family of five comes in, that’s still just one buying party. We sorted leads, ranked by interest. Even after discarding those who just wanted to see inside one of ‘those homes,’ we still had twenty serious parties in the market for a new home. More than half of those weren’t qualified for a property this upscale, but there was a good possibility we could match them with something else.
Two lucky agents roped contenders and by Wednesday, we had a bidding war. I had to stay out of the picture since I was clearly representing the seller. By the time the week was over, the winning bid was $1.15 million. Closing was set for December 30. Five happy people would get a check for $11,500. Bob would be starting the new year with a check for $23,000. We were definitely in a mood to celebrate.
Personally, I intended to take most of the remainder of the year off. The niggling idea I had when we got started on this project was still in the back of my head and I needed to be home to paint. I was also hoping Rita would be able to take some time off. Maybe we could go skiing. Regardless, I was taking a working vacation.
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