You Can “Put the Blame on Mame (the Realtor), Boys”
By Bill Primavera
The Home Guru
When I was a kid, my mother would say “Put the blame on Mame, boys” whenever she felt that she was accepting some kind of blame undeservedly. When I asked one day about the origin of the phrase, she told me it was the name of a song that was responsible for making Rita Hayworth a movie sex goddess in the 1940s.
Sure enough, when I saw the film “Gilda” (1946) on TCM, there was Rita in a black satin, strapless gown singing that very song, seductively as all get-out. I was so entranced by her beauty and the fact that the bodice of her gown seemed to defy gravity that I didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics.
But recently, I was surprised to learn that the lyrics involve the two most catastrophic events in our nation’s history that involved the loss of homes. One was the Chicago fire of 1871 where over 100,000 were left homeless, and the other was the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 in which 400,000 homes were destroyed. The gist of the lyrics was that, instead of believing the made-up legend of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern that started the Chicago conflagration, or the forces of nature that caused the earthquake, you could put the blame on Mame, whoever that was.
Just as Mame was not the real cause of these great calamities, in the current “great recession,” all kinds of bad situations involving housing can be blamed on the realtor.
Recently I was called by a gentleman who had received one of my “just listed” cards that realtors send out routinely. When he told me never to send him a card again, I apologized for any inconvenience, but explained that many people like these advisories to know what’s selling in their neighborhoods and at what price. He was not in that grouping. Instead he said, “It’s you realtors who made the prices of our homes go down!”
“How so?” I asked, recognizing full well that I shouldn’t have. “Because you set the prices low so that you can sell them more easily and make more money.”
In his opinion, the blame was not with the subprime mortgage deals, unemployment, bankruptcies, supply and demand or any of the other factors that played into the current decline in housing values, but with the realtor.
Soon after this incident, I learned that a residence in my town was entering into contract with a buyer who planned to utilize the property for a group home for young adults with autism, and the listing agent is my good friend Ann Shaw, who is also with Coldwell Banker. Having been aware of group home issues in the past, I knew that Ann’s seller would probably face some neighborhood opposition. And sure enough, I soon learned from Ann, who lives in the same neighborhood, that a “frenzy” had developed among her neighbors, fearing a loss in value in their homes, and they were blaming her, thinking she had brought the offer to the seller.
“What people don’t know is that the developmentally disabled residents of a proposed group home are protected by both state and federal laws on Fair Housing, and we realtors are required to present all offers that come to the seller,” she said. “What people don’t know is that this is a licensed profession requiring considerable education, and we subscribe to a very detailed code of ethics to guide our performance.
“In a strong seller’s market, buyers get frustrated if multiple offers come in and they don’t get the house they want, but they can blame the realtor,” Ann continued. “And when lending institutions were giving loans to buyers who were not qualified and prices were inflated, we were blamed for the buyers bidding too high. And, now that prices are coming down to a more realistic range, it’s the realtor who gets blamed. Why is that?”
My theory is that, while a buyer or seller rarely encounters an appraiser or the banker who denies a mortgage or forecloses on a home, the realtor is the face they know…and can blame when things go wrong. But we’re a hardy bunch and can take a hit of blame, undeserved as it may be, if it helps in any way!
Bill Primavera is a licensed Realtor® (www.PrimaveraHomes.com), affiliated with Coldwell Banker, and a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com). For questions or comments about the housing market, or selling or buying a home, he can be reached directly at 914-522-2076.