Beginning the real estate career

So there I was hired as a real estate agent!  Hired of course does not mean that you get money.  It just means you get a key to the building and perhaps a desk in a cubbyhole at the beginning.  I remember my desk was upstairs and since we had no MLS we had nothing to carry around with us.  I could sit there and use a phone but that was the extent of my need for a desk.

In order to share information as agents in that way-back-then year of 1979 or early 1980 we had to use wit.  We clipped advertisements from the newspapers where other companies had put their listings out to the public.  We then made us a little box with the inventory filed in some logical order so we'd know what there was to sell.  If we had a customer to show property and if we were fortunate enough to remember what was out there for sale, we'd make appointments with the other companies, drive to all the companies for keys to properties, and then we'd have to drop the keys off again.  It was a challenging job.

Then in a year or so we had this real estate agent come in from California.  He'd had a long career out there and was coming home supposedly to retire.  He told us about Multiple Listing Services where people actually shared their information and put it all in a book that would come out regularly.  SAY WHAT!!!  Those full time agents thought that was the best news they'd ever heard.  Leader-types scurried around and researched and subscribed to an MLS service and hired someone to run it before you could say SCAT!

So now the little part-time agent, ME, had a book to carry with me to the desk upstairs.

Then that California agent started another one of his tales.  He said that in California they had these things called lockboxes that kept you from having to run to all those offices and pick up keys and return them!  SAY WHAT!!!  Leader-types couldn't believe that but they scurried around and found that it was true!  Before you could say SCAT! a second time we had lockboxes. 

Those two things were the greatest things to happen to real estate in our town in the 80's.