I study the familiar faces as everyone settles in for the night – in front of me are all sizes, types, makes, ages, colors and any other description that can be conjured up for a group of pre-license students. After the chatter settles we summersault straight into Chapter 21 … regardless of how many times I teach it, Chapter 21 always stirs up the sermon in me. I can hear the yellow highlighters skidding over definitions, rules and regulations that will be on the next exam. Over to my right a hand goes up – “I don’t understand these words — what do steering and blockbusting mean? Come to find out, no one in the class had ever heard the words, and knew even less how to define them. Just goes to show, we’ve come a long way, baby.
The events and dates in this chapter are real to me. I remember watching on our black and white, as the President of the United States signed bills into law. I remember the little girl on the Norman Rockwell painting, having tomatoes thrown at her as she followed the police officers into Franz Elementary. I remember the fear of change. I remember real estate sales people driving folks around to neighborhoods to view houses – neighborhoods that these people would never have dared go into before. Because of that army of real estate people, an army of silent warriors who chose to put aside fear and do the right thing, those old common everyday phrases like red-lining are in the past and are mentioned only in history books …. and in chapter 21 of my real estate text.
Thursday night’s discussion in my pre-license class got me thinking …. A generation is defined as being approximately 40 years – in just one generation we changed the world. If we could change a wrong into a right in the 60s, we can do the same today.
We are again under a cloud of fear and uncertainty. The economy is upside down. Trouble is brewing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and on Wall Street. Real estate sales people hold the power to make a positive change. With every short sale, every foreclosure, every REO we sell, we are cleaning up the market’s streets. We are setting the nation’s house back in order. Instead of wasting time placing blame, the real estate foot soldiers of RE Company accepts the responsibility to defend our nation’s homes and is again making history.
Let’s join together, all sizes, types, makes, ages, colors and any other description that can be conjured up for a group of real estate sales people, take the charge and march into battle.