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eal Esta
D I A RY O F A
R te
Rookie
My Year of
Flipping,
Selling, and
Rebuilding—
and What I Learned
(The Hard Way)
AL IS O N RO G E R S
All rights reserved. The text of this publication, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher.
June 2007
07 08 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
ISBN-13: 978-1-4277-5465-3
Kaplan Publishing books are available at special quantity discounts to use for sales promotions,
employee premiums, or educational purposes. Please email our Special Sales Department to order
or for more information at [email protected], or write to Kaplan Publishing,
1 Liberty Plaza, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10006.
More than six million Americans move each year. If anecdotal ev-
idence is anything to go by, 5.9 million of them hate their real estate
agents.
So how did I end up going into a profession that ranks below “vam-
pire” on the trust scale? And why should that interest you? The answer to
the first question is: I had a midlife crisis. I had been a real estate journal-
ist at a big newspaper—the New York Post—and I got married. It seemed
important, if I was ever going to have a more interesting career and up my
income, to try out those things before the kids came.
The answer to the second question is: Things didn’t turn out like I
planned. I ended up exploring a much wider area of real estate than I
thought, from flipping to landlording to brokerage, and at every turn stuff
kept happening to me that wasn’t in the books. So I wrote my own.
Diary of a Real Estate Rookie is actually two books: a memoir of my
first year in real estate—which was also my first year of marriage—and a
personal finance guide to buying, selling, and renting. The year—as you’ll
The more I told it “like it is,” the more I got requests to tell it. Now,
you have to understand that Manhattan has been one of the fizziest real
estate markets on the planet: I have seen sell-out sales parties with water
dripping through the ceiling of the display apartment. I have been in a
penthouse where the Corcoran broker, offering the apartment for $3.99
million, had not managed to take away the show sheets left by the Stribling
broker, who had offered the unit just a few months earlier at $2.77 mil-
lion. Just yesterday, I was in a model unit priced at $2.3 million, where, I
swear to heaven, I could have done a better job installing the floors with a
staple gun. The sales agent told me with cool effrontery that they would
do a better job in the real units. And such is the mania of the market that I
walked out thinking, I wonder if my client can afford to pass this up?
So that’s what the book’s “Front Porch” material is: an attempt to pro-
vide personal finance and home advice, of a fairly basic kind, in the middle
of madness. Unlike a go-go stock cycle, real estate is a mania where it’s
hard to sit on the sidelines—we don’t all have to own WorldCom, but we
do all have to live somewhere. Yet a lot of the homes that are available now
are overpriced trash; I’ve been inside them, and I know. So while I can’t
lower the prices, I tried to make my tips as timeless as possible. If you
need more, visit my Web site at www.frontporchllc.com.
What else? Well, some of this tale was written down as it happened,
as a weekly column for Inman.com, and some of it is memoir that got
written down (or as my dearest husband would say, “reinterpreted”) later.
But everything in this book, including the heroin incident and the under-
wear incident, really happened, and happened to me. My darling friend
Persephone even allowed me to use her name, in addition to taking the
leap to be my very first client.
Also, I see things through a filter of upbringing (grew up in Little
Rock, Arkansas), race (white and grew up in Little Rock, where school-
ing and sometimes housing were fought over with guns), and class (up-
per-middle, Harvard-educated bourgeois bohemian). I tried not to shy
away from these perceptions even if they reflected somewhat poorly upon
me. Despite the best efforts of my copy editor, I use the words Realtor,
broker, and real estate agent, all of which have specific shades of meaning,
somewhat interchangeably; ditto customer and client. I am not trying to be
careless here, but the people we are working for, I find, do not worry so
much about the language and our industry’s need to split hairs about it;
they want us to do better.
By 2003, I was 36 years old and I had been humming the Mary Tyler
Moore theme for 15 years. That’s how long I had been living and work-
ing in New York, living in cramped and buggy apartments, thinking that
maybe, just maybe, something magical was going to happen to me. As a
Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, I was fast and smart
and funny and hardworking—but I was also, as my old boss Roz Berlin
once said, a hitzkop—a hothead. I fell in love with every new idea I had,
and let them tug me around like a weathervane.
By this point, I was a mid-level reporter, writer, and editor. I had
been drawn to journalism because I thought it would be fast-paced, stimu-
lating, and ever-changing; in reality, it was fast-paced, laborious, and rep-
etitious. Did I say repetitious? It was.
In a last, desperate bid to make something of myself, I threw all my
weight at my then-current employer, the Wall Street newspaper The Daily
Deal. I had been in the same job, doing the same thing, for ever-so-aching-
ly long (in real terms, a year and a half, but I felt so far behind). I started to
push and shove for an overseas posting, which, though not a promotion,
There was just the little matter of salary: I was making $99K per
year at The Daily Deal, and had just used that as a basis to buy a condo in
Manhattan after being absent from the city for two years. Because I al-
ready had an investment house at the beach, my housing costs were nearly
$55K, defrayed by a rental income of $15K. Spending 40 percent of my
gross income on housing may have been unwise, but it was a bull market
and real estate seemed like the right place to be. The trouble was the Post
was notoriously cheap, and the budget for the leader of the unlaunched
real estate section was frugal—how could they pay well until they’d seen a
success? Faye asked me if I really thought I could stand to take a salary cut
to $80K. Take it, take it! the little hitzkop voice said. You need a hit.
I asked for a six-month review to accelerate my raise schedule. “It
would be tough but I love real estate, and I’m dying to be at the Post,” I
said.
Faye offered me the job and shook my hand. “We’ll make it up to
you.”
Two years later, I had barely fought my way back to $90K, and my
pissed-off-ness knew no bounds. I had had my hit: The paper gained
30,000 readers (off a base in the high 400,000s) in the first six weeks
after we launched. Media recognition? The mighty New York Times had cop-
ied our formula for its real estate section relaunch. Financial success? Be-
tween revenue and circulation increases, I figured my section brought the
money-losing Post around $5 million over the two years I was there.
While I had gotten a $5,000 raise at my six-month mark, after that I found
nothing but battlefield: We didn’t have enough advertisers, would I please
stop pandering to advertisers; we didn’t have enough readers, would I please
stop doing TV interviews to gain readers; we didn’t have interesting national
content, would I please stop wasting my time talking to this Bob Vila person
(the Aussies, of course, did not know who he was) because even though he
offered to do columns for $400 a pop, I was just tying up the lawyers arguing
over his contracts and not really doing my job, whatever that was.
candidate? When Page Six wrote up that someone had lunch with an executive, a
grave error because the guy turned out to be dead? And hey, where’s the rest of the
money you promised me?)
I broke my poor crew’s back to work up an entirely independent cov-
er package—something extolling the virtues of suburban Connecticut, I
think it was—and Col preferred Harlem to it, so the original package was
published, just as I had asked. I had technically won, but we were done,
Col and I, and the paper and I as well. The tabloid fun was over. I got mar-
ried (the tall, dark, and nerdy guy had shown quite a bit of staying power)
and spent two weeks on my honeymoon touring Peru. Faye left her job
when I was in the rainforest, and a month after I came back, I quit.
So, out of disgust and motivated by greed, I went into real estate.
There’s a joke in the industry that real estate is no one’s first career; it’s
always something people come to by default, seeking money. (Apparently,
quite a lot of people, as there are more than a million registered Real-
tors in the United States.) I wanted what so many people want: a better
income, a better life, room to raise my family near great schools, a job
where I didn’t get ass-draggy just thinking about starting my day. I felt I
had little to show for my 18 years of corporate work; if I had been a cop,
at least I would be nearing retirement by now.
I had a toehold in real estate, though, that many of my peers didn’t
have. I had found a New Jersey real estate firm that would help me flip
houses—and they’d provide the capital. I was ready, I thought, to quit be-
ing a desk monkey and make the big money. Sure, there would be bobbles
along the way, but this would be an adventure. I had convinced my darling
handsome Ivan to marry me; clearly I was blessed and had a charmed life,
and I could do anything. Why not take the risk now?
I took out a home equity line on the beach house, which gave me
$26,000 (of which Citibank, the holder of my credit cards, promptly paid
itself back $10,000 I owed them) and I got my Jersey partners to sign on
to a business plan. I inked a deal with Web mogul Brad Inman to write a
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