I don't know if there was ever a point when I wasn't in real estate. I grew up in a Real Estate Family. I can remember my mother studying to take her license exam in 1962. In my mind's eye, I can see her sitting in the shade of a peach tree out in the back yard, reading the book that the State of Texas provided people to prepare them to take the real estate license exam. There weren't any classes or real estate schools. You just took a test to get a license. At that point, a person just made a decision about which type of exam they wanted to take, Salesman or Broker. My mom said that she didn't see any reason to not take the Brokers exam, so she did. She ended up as the President of the Women's Counsel in our town. Participation in that group gave her a lot of pleasure over the years. I have her President's pin in my jewery box. It is one of my treasures.
My mom liked to buy little houses that she used as rentals. My dad always referred to them as "your mother's old dogs". He was right. They were. But, 40 years later, we still have 4 of those properties and they are still making money for us. There is a reason they call it REAL estate. It doesn't go away. It is very, very real.
As a child it was common for me to have to help clean up a place after a tenant had moved out. It seems as if it was always my job to clean the dead vegtables out of the refrigerator. As I threw limp carots into the trash, I swore I would find another way to make a living. Believe me, I looked. But, I always came back to what I know best and love most. And here I am, all these years later.
I did my first real estate deal in 1976 and I have never looked back. For many years I just did deals for myself, buying and selling properties. Another thing that I did was I was part of an effort that resulted in the creation of a small subdivision. We did the utility installation, built the roads, filed the plat, marketed the properties, privately financed the sales and then serviced the loans. I got to hand-amortize those mortgages. I bought my first computer specifically to deal with calculating the interest on those loans.
At one point, I worked for a lender, doing document preparation. That job lasted for a couple of years. During another period, I worked for a title company, cleaning up title issues. That job really was fun. I had a desk at the back of the abstract plant and I did the detective work needed to clean up files where title issues had developed. It was also the only time in my life where I only worked 40 hours a week. They made me go home at 5. I hardly knew how to deal with THAT! I'd walk out the back door of the title company at 5:05, look around and say to myself "now what?" It was a really strange sensation to have my work-day end before bedtime.
Something else I have done is mess with old houses. If you want to understand how a house is built, try taking it apart and putting it back together. There is a learning curve there for just about everybody. Have you noticed that on most job sites, there is someone who gets to do the pointing? Usually that is my job. I get to point and say "that still needs fixing!". That is an important job, believe me!
I haven't always been the Inspector on the job site. Every now and then I have done the work. I remember one time, reframing the floor of a rent house bathroom by myself. I started to hang a floor joist. There I was, with my feet on the dirt under a pier-and-beam house, when I suddenly realized that a level might be a really handy tool to have at that moment. It still makes me laugh.
In 1998, my life changed dramatically. Part of that change was that I moved to a new town. I decided to go on and get my license and build a new life in a new town on the foundation of the large baseline of information I had accumulated over my lifetime. So, there I was, in a town where I didn't know anyone, where I didn't know the names of the streets, trying to sell real estate. It made sense to me at the time that I did it, but it wasn't easy. I rapidly discovered that although I knew a whole lot about real estate in general, I didn't know anything at all about sales. Nada. And, it took me quite a while to climb up on that horse and start trotting down the road. But I got it figured out and now I go down the road pretty consistently at a pretty fair clip.
And, that is the story of my life in real estate.
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