Spying a familiar couple loitering in the vicinity of the punch bowl, Early staggered in their direction.

“David! Katherine,” Early boomed, thrusting his hand like a bayonet at the former before wrapping the latter in a boozy half-embrace.

“What’s it been, two, three years?”

“What a surprise,” the woman said through a forced smile. Her eyes implored her husband for help as she tried to wriggle out from under Early’s heavy forearm.

“More like six or seven,” David corrected, extracting his wife, Carol, by her bony elbow.

“How’s the house,” Early continued undeterred. Red liquid sloshed over the rim of the punch bowl as he lunged for the ladle, scattering several fellow revelers.

“Outgrown that little place yet? Prices are really on the rise, it might be the time to move on up!”

“We did,” David deadpanned, staring directly into his former agent’s swimming, cobalt eyes. “This fall.”

“Good for you,” Early gushed, clapping the intense, little man on the shoulder. “You should have called me, though. I would have gotten you more money.”

“Funny you say that-” David began, but Early was already on the move.

The couple shared an eye roll as the squishy man in the small, plaid coat plowed through a knot of protesting guests en route to his next target.

“Jathon,” Early slurred as he locked on to another past client. His prey’s eyes darted in all directions for a lifeline, but it was too late. He was caught in the drunken tractor beam.

“Hello, Early,” Jason mumbled, offering a stick of gum to the close-talker that was summarily declined. “How’s it going?”

“That depends,” Early grinned, confident in his wittiness. “Why don’t you ask my jeweler?”

He flashed a turquoise boulder that was the latest in a long procession of candidates to adorn his left ring finger.

“Don’t tell the ex, though,” Early whisper-shouted with an exaggerated wink. “She’ll hit me up for more child support.”

“So you’re back in real estate, then,” Jason stated rhetorically.

“Yessir, back in black,” Early bragged, punctuating the boast with a clumsy attempt at shadow boxing.

“Too bad you weren’t around two years ago when I had to sell short,” Jason lamented, a twinge of spite turning the statement into an accusation. “I called your office. They said you were selling mobile phone plans.”

“Two years ago, you say,” Early asked, his thin, reddish-blonde eyebrows arching. “That means you should be in a position to buy!”

Early fumbled through his jacket for a card. He wiggled the tips of his sausage fingers just far enough into a strained breast pocket to extract one.

“Wait, wrong one,” Early frowned, tucking the card for his event planning business back in his pocket and fishing out another one. “Ah, here it is!”

Jason marveled at the hand-written name and cell phone number before declining the offering.

“Thanks Early, but I’m already hooked up with someone.”

“Come on, Jathon,” Early groaned, nearly falling as he swayed forward. He was now sweating profusely in the cold room.

“Whoth gonna get you a better deal than me?”

“Oh I don’t know,” Jason replied. “Maybe someone who sticks with me in the down times, too?”

“Whath that thuppoth to mean,” Early demanded, his brow beetled to comedic degree with confusion.

Several nearby guests looked at the pair sharply.

“You’re a front-runner, Early,” Jason informed the teetering agent.

“You’re damn right I am,” Early boomed, spilling his drink and missing the point.

The rubber-neckers slowly backed away from the unfolding scene.

“How can I trust you today if you won’t be around for the consequences tomorrow,” Jason asked pointedly. “You hop in and out of the business like a rabbit with ADD.”

“I-uh, well, that’s just …,” Early stammered. “Guy’s gotta make a living …”

“Have a nice night, Early,” Jason excused himself.

“Fine! Who needs you anyway,” Early shouted after him. “I’m knocking down ten k a month! How’s THAT for front running?!”

The room went quiet as all eyes fell upon the reeling agent. A slender woman weaved through the stunned gawkers, the clicking of her heels clearly audible.

“You promised you wouldn’t do this, Early,” the hostess said quietly upon reaching him, her red-sequined dress now attracting attention she didn’t want.

“Do what,” Early croaked, gesturing at the silent throng, “Offer my friends the deal of a lifetime?!”

“MY friends, Early,” she corrected. “Mine.”

“Oh, okay. I get it,” Early announced, hands up in defensive fashion. “I see how it is. Well, the hell with you, sis!”

“The hell with all of you,” he boomed, his face turning a deep crimson.

He lurched towards the door after making a circuitous detour to refill his dixie cup. He stopped in the doorway and turned to face the hushed crowd. He held the cup aloft as if making a toast.

“Early Croffort, proudly not serving any of your real estate needs since 2012,” he spit.

Early took as deep a bow as his equilibrium would allow, downed the contents, crushed the cup in his fist, and extended his middle finger.

“Happy new year, fukerths!”

With that, he turned and stormed into the night.

The silence in the room lingered for a full minute.

“And here I thought the downturn weeded agents like him from the industry,” a man’s voice chimed in, breaking the silence.

“It did,” another assured him. “For awhile, at least. Now that the market’s getting better, all the zombies are coming back to life. Agents like him are straight Freddy Kruger.”

“Where did he come from anyway,” a bewildered woman asked.

“Personal referral,” yet another party-goer answered. Nearly everyone in attendance cast a look at the mortified hostess whose head was now buried in her hands.

“Just goes to show there’s only one place to find someone you can truly trust these days,”  someone else decreed.

The guests looked around at each other, nodding. Murmured agreement rippled through the gathering before numerous voices made the proclamation in unison.

“The internet.”

Scottsdale, AZ – As anyone who has attempted to buy or sell a home over the past seven years can attest, the Real Estate market has proven unstable at best. New findings released by the Phoenix-based American Behavioral Coalition this morning may explain why.

“The Scottsdale Real Estate Market suffers from Schizoaffective Disorder,” Dr. Angela Merkins of the ABC claims.

You mean it’s mental?

“Well, it suffers from a personality disorder anyway,” Dr. Merkins affirmed. “Comparing the peaks and valleys of the past decade to the market’s baseline history, we can only conclude that an acute trauma, brought on by a specific event, caused a psychotic break with consciousness that has yet to be fully repaired.”

Dr. Merkins expanded when pressed on the nature of said event.

“Could have been anything,” Dr. Merkins explained. “A chance encounter with a cash-poor investor triggering a suppressed memory from the 1980s, an episode of delusional paranoia spurred by an influx of Californian speculators, who knows? All that is clear is that the Scottsdale Real Estate Market went bugshit crazy on February 14th, 2005.”

From high-rolling night-owl that snorts Alka Seltzer off the bare stomachs of $5000 a night showgirls, to indigent transient that smells of four day old cat food and sour milk, the Scottsdale Real Estate Market has seen more ups and downs in recent years than a Mount Everest sherpa. Until recently, the market had been under the care and supervision of the mental health staff at ABC, but its current whereabouts are unknown after budget cutbacks mandated its transfer to a less secure facility.

“I’m worried about it,” Dr. Merkins confirmed, acknowledging that the patient, disguised as JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, recently checked itself out of a halfway house. “After a long period of clinical depression, the market was finally coming around. But now, all that progress hangs in the balance.”

This is often the most dangerous point for a psychiatric patient.

“The concern is that the patient will feel the medication and therapy that has brought him or her back to a point of normalcy is no longer necessary, especially if the pull to experience the rush of a manic phase is too strong to resist. They think they can just go back on their medication once they’ve experienced the exhilaration of the high and avoid the low, but it doesn’t work like that.”

Asked if she saw any particular danger of that occurring in this instance, Dr. Merkins was blunt.

“Look at what’s going on out there,” she lamented. “Multiple offers, bidding wars, pictures on the internet of the market passed out at a frat party with a lampshade on its head … the only thing missing is stated income financing for jobless meth addicts.”

When asked if she had had any communications with her former patient, Dr. Merkins blushed.

“It left me a message at two AM this morning,” Dr. Merkins confessed, holding up her cell phone as evidence. “Mostly slurred speech to the point of being incomprehensible, but I distinctly heard the phrase Colombian bath salts.”

So what does this mean for Scottsdale home buyers and sellers?

“Buckle up and keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times,” Dr. Merkins cautioned. “And don’t take any open beverages from a stranger. Trust me on this.”

- Paul Slaybaugh, BSRE News ©2012

“Good, huh,” his smug companion inquired, seeking less an opinion than an acknowledgement of the self-evident truth.

“You were right,” Max agreed, nodding at the moon-faced young man as he set the mug down on the Ms. Pacman coaster on the metal table between them. “Definitely not the usual.”

Greyson “Graze” Mays smirked as he swiveled away from Max on his chrome bar stool, only to jolt back a moment later, arresting his indulgent spin with a pair of green Converse One Stars. He steepled his fingers under his chin as he redirected the conversation back to the matter at hand.

“So in light of recent developments,” Graze began, indicating not the half-inch thick ream of subdivision data that the Realtor had spent the previous hour belaboring, but newspaper clippings from various periodicals that were haphazardly spread about the table. “This is clearly a seller’s market, and buyers will pay a premium for a unique home such as this one.”

Max looked about the three bedroom ranch, thinking the shade of formica on the kitchen counter tops might have been slightly different in the home of the same model that sold down the street in January for eighty five thousand less than his erstwhile companion had in mind.

“It’s true that the market has turned,” Max allowed. “However, there has to be some basis for-“

“I showed you the new crown molding in the master bedroom, right,” Graze interrupted.

“You did,” Max affirmed. “It’s lovely.”

“And the chandelier I added in the dining room?”

“Beautiful choice,” Max replied, craning his neck to take in the garish atrocity that was the self-styled hipster’s attempt at retro ironic.

“Look,” Max began, changing the arc. “You have a great house, and it will likely sell above recent comps due to the work you’ve done and the lack of competition in the market, but within reason. We can’t jump comps by the better part of a hundred grand and realistically expect to find a buyer.”

“There’s no way my house is worth less than I paid for it,” Graze objected, adjusting his black, horn-rimmed glasses. “All these articles say prices are up twenty percent!”

“Three things,” Max said, holding up three well-tanned, corresponding fingers. “First, you have to remember that you bought the home in oh eight. Unfortunately, the market experienced three straight years of heavy losses before this recent resurgence.”

“But-“

“Second,” Max interrupted, returning the favor. “You can’t directly apply general market trends and percentages to any one specific property. Yes, the median sales price for the Valley is up approximately twenty percent in the last twelve months, but we can’t throw out the most recent neighborhood-specific sales in favor of such broad generalities to determine current market value.”

“The people down the street-“

“Are smoking crack,” Max finished over Graze again. “Just because they are asking an egregiously stupid price for their home, doesn’t mean we have to hop in the idiot bus to clambake with them. People can ask whatever they want for something. It’s irrelevant to value until they get it.”

“Third,” Graze challenged.

“Third is the inconvenient matter of the appraisal,” Max obliged. “Even if we luck into a buyer who just fell off the turnip truck, it means nothing if the home doesn’t appraise. And you can bet your bippy that an appraiser will review the very same sales I’m looking at when I tell you that the house is justifiably worth no more than two ten, max.”

“Great Scott,” Graze moaned, removing his spectacles and face-palming himself. A prematurely receding hairline did nothing to mitigate the fact that he looked all of thirteen years old without his glasses.

“The good news is that prices are finally heading in the right direction,” Max volunteered. “Another year or two at this rate and we’ll be able to break you out of here.”

“But by then I won’t be able to afford the new house I want to buy,” Graze lamented.

“That’s the rub,” Max ceded. “But there’s more than one way to skin a Kardashian.”

“I’m listening,” Blaze allowed, smiling despite himself at his elder counterpart’s clumsy attempt to bridge the generational divide through pop culture.

“You might consider renting the house out for the next year or two,” Max obliged. “As long as you qualify to carry both loans, you can lock in a new place at today’s prices while someone else pays the rent on this place until it gets to a point where we can sell it.”

“Not real keen on being a landlord,” Graze worried, taking a sip of his own iced coffee through a purple twisty straw. “Can’t bear to think of a tenant on the new shag carpet. You sure you can’t sell it for two ninety?”

“I’m good, but I’m not that good,” Max assured him. He stood and gathered his things. “I’ll run some rental figures this evening and let you know how they look. In the meantime, why don’t you call this guy.”

Max placed a business card on the table.

“My go-to lender. He should be able to tell you whether or not it’s feasible to buy without having to sell just yet.”

Graze looked at the card, but made no move to retrieve it.

“No offense, but I think I’m going to get a second opinion,” he informed the agent. “There’s a Realtor that specializes in this neighborhood. I get her flyers and mailings all the time.”

“By all means,” Max welcomed. “If she really knows the neighborhood, she’ll give it to you straight.”

“Well, thank you so much for the good news and enthusiasm,” Graze muttered, straightening his Napoleon Dynamite t-shirt as he walked Max to the door. “Want to kick my dog on the way out?”

“Nah, I like dogs,” Max grinned, reaching down to pet the yipping, over-sized rodent that joined them in the foyer. “But your coffee tastes like shit.”

Taken aback by the affront, a slight gurgle emanated from the younger man’s fleshy gullet.

Judas, his watery brown eyes hissed.

Max shrugged, hardened into the role of executioner by the last half decade.

“Call me when your listing with the neighborhood expert expires.”

Chip Donaghue stared at the pathetic, grey man on the gurney. Tubes ran in and out of his crystallized body, connecting him to a bank of beeping machines and monitors.

“Sublimation is typical,” the humorless doctor beside him announced.

“Sublimation?”

“Freezer burn,” the doctor clarified, his high-pitched voice at odds with its gravelly undertones. He struck Chip as a man who had spent considerable time exploring the outer edges of life’s spectrum.

The beeping intensified moments before the patient sat straight up.

“He’s awake,” Chip shouted, taking a step toward the bed before being restrained by a vice-like grip.

He looked back to find the doctor’s skeletal hand clamped to his meaty shoulder.

How can he be that strong? Chip wondered.

“Keep your distance,” the doctor rasped. “He’s not lucid.”

“Like hell,” Chip argued, struggling in vain to free himself. “Look at him!”

“That’s just gas,” the doctor informed him.

“Gas,” Chip protested, incredulous. “He’s sitting up for crissakes!”

“The cells in the core are the first to awaken,” the doctor assured him. “They expand as they release CO2. Get too close during the herky-jerky and you’re apt to get clipped by an errant limb.”

The patient’s mouth remained a frozen “oh” as his sightless grey-brown eyes stared into the infinity. His right arm suddenly shot straight up.

“Pow, right in the kisser,” the doctor whispered. Sensing resignation, he relaxed his grip on Chip’s shoulder.

The two men watched in silence as random body parts took turns flailing about over the course of the next few minutes. Chip was reminded of a fish flopping around on dry land, desperate for breath. The room took on a gamey odor as life returned to long-dormant flesh.

The chaotic symphony reached the patient’s face.

“Now remember,” the doctor reminded Chip. “He’s not going to recognize you. Not at first, and maybe not at all.”

Chip sighed. He’d been waiting for this moment for six years. Now that it was finally here, he wasn’t sure he was ready for it.

The patient’s left eyelid spasmed. Then the right. His nose twitched.

This is it, Chip gulped. Please … oh, please …

“Mr. Niedelman?”

The patient did not respond to the doctor’s query.

“Mr. Niedelman,” the doctor tried again, in a stronger voice. “Can you hear me?”

Ed Niedelman broke six years of silence by barking like a dog.

“This happens sometimes,” the doctor assured Chip. “The synapses of the brain are especially prone to bursting and misfire upon rapid thaw. Give it a minute for the connections to reestablish themselves.”

“No,” Chip said shaking his head as the woofing continued unabated. “It worked! By God, it worked!”

The doctor raised a quizzical white eyebrow.

“This is how Ed celebrates a big sale,” Chip explained. “If you remember, we had him frozen at the closing table for the Meyers transaction. We had no more leads to feed him, so figured we’d put him on the shelf while we rode out the storm. Wanted his last memory to be a good one. Bless his heart, he still thinks it’s 2006!”

“Welcome back, big dog,” Chip, the managing broker at Prickly Pear Properties, gushed as he approached his sales associate. “You ready to eat?”

Niedelman jumped out of the bed, howling. He nearly lost his footing as he landed in a pool of water on the polished concrete floor.

“Outstanding,” Chip bellowed, clapping his underling on the back as he helped free him from the wires and tubes that bound him. “Let’s go wake up Peterson.”

The doctor attended to the vacated station as the awkward pair lumbered over to the next cryogenic chamber.

“One second, gentlemen,” he sighed, eyeing the half-naked, born-again charlatan and his Svengali with despair.

He had lost nearly fifty percent of his clients to reanimation since January first. The recovering Real Estate market was exciting news to everyone but him it seemed.

Time to start farming for new clientele.

But who? As Realtors began their rise from the ashes, which demographic was ready to take its place at the precipice of a great unknown … and in his freezer?

A thin smile spread across his narrow face as it came to him.

Of course, he thought. Moderate Republicans.

Which makes the case of Agnes Friedman all the more unusual.

“I’m more of a go along to get along type,” Mrs. Friedman, a Real Estate agent with As You Wish Realty, LLC told BSRE news.

Admired by her peers for an amicable disposition which makes cross-transactions a breeze, she has come under fire as of late for her “path of least resistance” model of client advocacy.

“Nobody likes a salesman,” Friedman explained. “Well, I mean, maybe some people do, but I … I’m not saying it’s wrong if you do, just … what do you think?”

Bethany O’Leary, a former client of Friedman’s, was originally drawn to that very unsalesy manner when selecting a REALTOR to list her 4 bedroom McCormick Ranch home last May.

“She was such a breath of fresh air,” O’Leary told reporters when reached for comment at the same 4 bedroom McCormick Ranch home. “All the others wanted to talk about the market and toot their own horns. Agnes was willing to listen … and to ultimately do whatever I told her to do.”

Asked to corroborate, Friedman smiled and offered reporters coffee.

“No, the house didn’t sell,” O’Leary admitted. “But it didn’t sell on my terms.”

Dennis LeGrudge recently purchased a home utilizing Friedman’s services as a buyer’s agent.

“It started out great,” LeGrudge said over the sound of running water. “Agnes showed me everything, whether I was qualified to buy it or not. She even brought snacks.”

Things went awry once Mr. LeGrudge located a property that he wanted to purchase.

“At first, her advice made a lot of sense,” he allowed. “I didn’t want to insult the seller, so I gave him full price.”

In hindsight, LeGrudge thinks that may have been his first mistake.

“I wish I’d known the house had been on the market for fourteen months,” he lamented.

Problems compounded for LeGrudge when the home inspection revealed a bad roof and a missing air conditioning unit. Rather than banging heads with the seller on the deficiencies, his agent convinced him that all homes had issues, and not to upset the seller by requesting frivolous repairs.

“Frivolous,” LeGrudge scoffed. “Hear that burst pipe? I think they plumbed this place with twisty straws.”

One competitor, who chose to remain anonymous, hopes Friedman never lets the industry change her.

“It’s inspiring to see someone so determined to remain true to her benevolent nature in this dog eat dog business,” Agent X said. “I hope she never loses that.”

When pressed, Agent X admitted he has an ulterior motive for Friedman to continue with her current practices.

“Yeah,” he confirmed with a wink. “As long as Agnes negotiates like Bambi, I’m more than happy to thump’er.”

- Paul Slaybaugh, Disassociated Press

“I just don’t know what to write about now that my cat died,” Dolores Pentupangst of Katy, Texas lamented. “Frolix was good for one, maybe two posts a week with his wacky antics. Now that he’s gone … you don’t just replace that kind of hole in your blogroll.”

Long considered a black hole for creativity by her peers despite a prodigious output, Pentupangst has been reduced to trolling the Real Estate net for content to take issue with in recent months.

“Trolling itself is an art,” she assured reporters from her basement via Skype. “You have to wait for just the right moment to jump in and piss all over the original poster and the sycophants in the comment stream. Too soon and you kill the thread prematurely, limiting the damage. Too late and no one is around to witness it.”

Pressed on whether surfing the interwebs 23 hours a day in search of a fight is the highest and best use of a Real Estate agent’s time, Pentupangst assured reporters that she had more than enough time left over to sell a home this year.

“Not everyone has the gift of original thought,” Bob Stuartson of ReTopBlog admitted of those who utilize his online Real Estate writing platform. “Some are better suited to what we call ‘reblogging’ and ‘counter-posting.’ If you can’t write your way out of a wet paper bag, your options are pretty much limited to reconstituting someone else’s work or calling them stupid.”

“Not original, huh,” Pentupangst countered, chuckling. “Tell that to the clown in Delaware who authored the piece about dual agency last week. I bet he didn’t wake up on Tuesday expecting to find his name hyperlinked to a picture of a sow’s ass in comment number thirty seven.”

While Pentupangst may be reduced to critiquing the work of those who contribute original material to the collective mainframe for the time being, she doesn’t figure to be out of circulation for long.

“I adopted a Yorkie.”

Paul Slaybaugh, Disassociated Press

Held between the thumb and index finger of the hand that emerged from a white coat sleeve, the golden implement caught and reflected the overhead lights in mesmerizing fashion.  No doubt by design.

Reaching to accept the offering, he did so not of his own volition.  As had been the case since Emma declared the community “home” within seconds of their first visit, Reggie felt the conveyer belt moving beneath his feet, hurtling him towards a purchase that didn’t feel right.

The house was exactly what he wanted.  Boasting 3 bedrooms split from a home office, the warm slice of Tuscany was ideal for his burgeoning family. A play pool, a swing set in the middle of the community park and a tree-lined street with neighbors who actually waved when they saw you coming … it was Pleasantville in every conceivable way.

As he took the pen, squinting away the glare to scrutinize the engraved homage to the “Top Producer” across the table, he chastised himself for his hesitance.  If there was one thing that defined the walking neurosis that was Reginald Painter, it was the perplexing inability to make a decision.  Asked to pick the movie on date night, he’d break out in a cold sweat between the “Romantic Comedy” and “Thriller” aisles.  Given a choice of soup or salad, he was apt to order both.  Why, the mere mention of “paper or plastic” had been known to reduce him to a catatonic state. Steeling his resolve, he hunted for the signature line with his trembling hand.

The air fled the sales office as the world around him slowed to a crawl.  He felt as though he were breathing through one of Gabe’s twisty straws. Unable to scrawl his name and unable to pull his hand back, he stared at the ponding ink where the pen dug into the contract.  The formerly amicable pair of watery, brown eyes across the table narrowed to predatory crescents – the flint of a looming sale sharpening the agent’s countenance to a wolfish blade.  Reg’s mind eye foresaw a suddenly hirsute figure leaping upon the table between them to howl over its fresh kill.

Then the noise of the cavernous surroundings returned, louder than before, amplified by the preceding silence.  The man across from him once again nothing more than a run of the mill sales associate, making him more or less human. The agent laughed in obvious discomfort.

“Earth to Reg,” the Realtor was saying.  “You okay in there, boss?”

“Yeah, um, fine.  I’m fine.  Sorry,” Reggie responded.

He looked around to see if anyone else noticed the episode, his face hot with embarrassment. A manic middle-aged woman was loitering in the vicinity, but she was too busy prattling on about her recent kitchen remodel to pay him any mind.

Re-gripping the pen with a sense of determination, Reggie bent again to make his mark.  It was time to move out of a self-imposed Purgatory and into the rest of his life.  And his dream home.

Expecting a Herculean effort in deliberation, he was shocked to see his hand fly across the page, with flair no less.  He’d done it!

Except he hadn’t.  Seeing an indentation but no ink, he realized the pen was dead.  He chuckled at the irony.

“Not a problem, not a problem,” the agent assured Reggie as he rifled through the pockets of his ill-fitting jacket, his broad shoulders testing the tensile strength of its burdened seams.  “I have a spare here somewhere.”

Now it was the agent whose brow began to sweat.  The momentary panic relented when he found what he was looking for inside a coat pocket.

“Your sword, my liege,” the agent intoned, bowing his head in mock reverence and extending the considerably less impressive Bic that was emblazoned with prescription drug branding.

When his joke was met with silence, he lifted his head.

Reggie was shuffling away in the direction of the television.  He was missing a slipper.

“How’s business today, Mr. Landry?”

The agent looked in the direction of the new arrival’s voice.

“Brisk, sir. Brisk,” he assured his questioner.  “I’m closing a sale right now.”

“Or I would be if you hadn’t gone and chased off my prospect,” he snorted as his eyes drifted back to the retreating figure.

Reggie had sauntered over to a cluster of unoccupied chairs on the far side of the recreation room, paralyzed into standing by the multiple seating options.

“The Vintage Square Development,” the newcomer asked.

Saul Landry eyed the interloper with suspicion before a wide smile spread across his face.

“Why yes, indeed … Vintage Square… marvel of modern architecture and the last place you will ever call home,” he segued.  “You strike me as the family type, am I right?”

“You got me,” said the doctor, settling into the chair opposite his patient. His own face stared back at him from the identification badge on the breast pocket of his pilfered coat.

“Do you have any move-in ready specs,” the doctor asked, placing a tape recorder on the table and pressing ‘record’ as he welcomed the forthcoming sales pitch for the long-defunct housing project.

Now that the outside world stood at the brink of a recovery, the rehabilitation efforts for his charges at the Shady Acres Home For the Criminally Inequitable could begin in earnest.

Today’s was an important session.

“You’re in luck,” Saul answered, adjusting his non-existent tie. “Looks like one just opened up!”

As the foreclosure crisis here in Scottsdale is beginning to show signs of easing, if not exactly abating, your fellow Real Estate professionals are eager to welcome you back to the ranks of humanity.

You’ve been missed!

You’ve done what you needed to do to stay afloat during the difficult times of the past few years, but now that your bank business is slowly petering out, we have a few tips to help ease the transition back to regular old resale transactions. By following the advice herein, you should have little trouble re-assimilating with the general population.

1. Invest in some Supra lockboxes. We don’t fault you for not wanting to spend $70 a pop for an electronic box when you were carrying 50 listings at a time (okay, we do, but we aren’t ones to carry a grudge), but it’s a small sacrifice for the security of your mom and pop clients and ease of access for your fellow agents now that you are down to two overpriced townhouses.
2. You have to return phone calls again. As a busy professional, we understand that you can’t always field a call. Just bear in mind before letting everything roll to voicemail purgatory that you will need the sales force now that you can’t rely on grossly underpriced homes to do the job for you.
3. Burn your addenda. Then piss on it. Every last piece of superfluous documentation that your employing banks made we hard-working stiffs submit in advance of a purchase acceptance.
4. Regarding feedback on your new resale listings … um, yeah, not going to happen until you update us on the status of every unanswered offer we have collectively submitted on your REO listings over the past five years.
5. Camera phone listing photos … time to rethink this one. We recommend mixing in a shot or two of the interior while you’re at it. Human sellers appreciate marketing.
6. Be advised that our sellers will respond to all offers you draft in 3-5 business days. Or thereabouts. Your business is important to us, and we thank you in advance for your patience.
7. We do NOT advise touting your recent success of underselling the neighborhood, or looking equity sellers directly in the eye on your first forays back into the wild. They will charge.
8. Planning on working with buyers again? They are those vaguely homo sapienish looking creatures you have been studiously ignoring since 2006. We’d be happy to make introductions. They don’t think you really exist.
9. Time frames matter again.
10. Send the legion of fresh-faced assistants back for their diplomas. They still have a chance to make something of their young lives.

And most importantly, remember to have fun. Because we’re going to have a bunch of it at your expense in the coming months.

Sincerely,

The Real Estate Community

PS – We may have taken a few of your former clients while you were gone. Our bad. If you can pick any of yours out of a lineup, we will gladly return them. If not … tough titty for you, fishface.

________________________________________________________________________________

Note: This bit of light-hearted fare is purely satire and not intended to impugn the integrity and/or professionalism of my fellow REALTORS.

Much. 

This Home Does Not Suck!

Abe chuckled at his first entry, quickly moving past the throwaway writing prompt to the genuine attempts that followed.

Housing Nirvana … Smells Like Value, Not Teen Spirit!

He cringed, moved down a line.

$hort on Equity, Long on Charm!

Jesus, Abe thought. These sounded a lot better in his head.

Why Settle for Cookie Cutter When You Can Have a Cookie MONSTER?

Definitely not what he was going for, he moved on to the next candidate.

If You Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home!

Abe drew an angry line through the barely legible cursive, annoyed that he’d let a well-traveled cliche infiltrate his quest for fresh, unique verbiage in his advertising.

At the End of the Day, Aren’t We All Bank-Owned?

Abe groaned as he skipped this one, too, making a mental note to mine the thought for future blog fodder.

Diamond in the Guf!

Too biblical.

Where the West Was Wondered …

“What the hell is that supposed to mean,” he demanded of the empty room.

Abe dropped the pen and snatched a half-full can of Coke Zero off the desk. He took a deep pull, savoring the sweet cola’s aroma as much as its taste.

He glanced at the notepad.

Territorial Delight … Wanna Party, Cowboy?

Nearly spitting the dark liquid all over the desk, Abe was instead treated to a sudden rush of carbonation up his considerable schnoz. His eyes teared up as the resulting inferno threatened to ignite the thatch of grey-black kindling that protruded from each flared nostril.

“That’s it,” he declared, turning to his computer as the burning subsided.

The flashing cursor was poised on the blank title line, imploring its master to yield to the inevitable.

With a heavy sigh, Abe obliged.

He typed Forever Views! and printed the flyer.

Damn.

Barry Wong, a residential Realtor with Prickly Pear Properties, says the time has come for consumers to enjoy the same level of scrutiny to which service providers are subjected.

“I’m not a toaster,” Wong stressed when reached for comment at his ‘mobile office’ in the parking lot of the Goodwill on Scottsdale Rd between Thomas and McDowell.

“Nor am I a used Pontiac or a sandwich shop,” Wong continued. “Yet everyone feels the need to put a numerical value on the ongoing, long-term service I provide nowadays.”

Asked to quantify the difficulty of ranking the unique, involved relationships that agents share with their clients on a scale of 1-10, Wong rated it an ’8′.

“There are far too many variables from transaction to transaction, and relationship to relationship for clients to rate me effectively on a simple, translatable scale,” Wong argued. “Especially when much of the job takes place behind the scenes, the customer never realizes the true value of what has been provided.”

Wong was less conflicted by the ability to rank consumer behavior, however.

“It’s simple,” Wong noted. “They either screw you over or they don’t.”

Adopting a four star rating system for the online repository that he hopes will help his fellow professionals avoid the all too common, non-profitable encounters with shiftless time-wasters, Wong envisions a national platform that will fully illuminate this dark side of the sales equation.

“Four stars are for successful closings within six months of initial contact,” he explained. “Three stars will reflect clients who purchased or sold a home beyond the six month threshold.”

Not everyone is convinced that the attempt to level the playing field is a prudent course of action in an era of consumer empowerment.

“The online evaluation of those who would bring you business has never been attempted,” Gustav Merkins of the consumer advocacy group Are You High? claimed when reached for comment. “That’s because it is patently idiotic.”

“If I can save just one agent from driving all over town with some grifter with a history of shining salespeople on, it will all be worth it,” Wong asserted in the face of such naysaying.

Asked to clarify the significance of the final two points in the rating scale he created during a night of binge drinking on the heels of a lost listing, Wong obliged.

“Two stars are for customers who never buy or sell anything,” he confirmed. “One star is reserved for customers who grade agents poorly on online rating sites.”

“Look,” Wong concluded. “I am a firm believer that the customer is always right, except when he’s not. That’s where shame and public humiliation comes into play.”

– Paul Slaybaugh, BSRE News ©2011