The Way We Were
By our own, Betty Holt
People sometimes ask me how real estate was back in the late 70’s when I first started. “It was pretty different,” I usually reply. “It really bears no resemblance to today’s fast-paced, sometimes frantic attempts to buy property. Things were a lot slower then.” For starters, the main way Realtors got business was when people walked through their doors. “Walk-ins,” as they were affectionately called, were usually people visiting Highlands who had an interest in property. Often, they were enticed to enter a certain office because of photos in the window or a black and white advertisement they had seen in the Real Estate Buyer’s Guide magazine. A small, entry level house with two or three bedrooms usually sold in the $20,000’s or $30,000’s. Most of the sales were cash, with interest rates around 14% in the early 80’s. There was some owner financing those days as well. Realtors came to the office every day because that’s where people found them. Mostly it was a nine-to-five job, six days a week, with an occasional Sunday, and sometimes calls going back and forth at night to negotiate an offer. Sellers sent telegrams to confirm they had accepted an offer, because the mail back and forth could take a week or more. Until the paperwork was complete, we relied on the good word of people that they planned to go through with the sale. The sales contract was one legal page, front and back, compared to our 15 pages and several disclosures today. Copies were painstakingly slow to make in small machines that involved slick pink paper that accompanied the documents.
There was a small local MLS that approximately six offices belonged to. We had a tiny listing book that had some information about the listing and maybe one photo. In those days most listings were “open” listings, not exclusives. It was always confusing to our clients to see the same picture in several ads in the Buyer’s Guide . eople who wanted to sell their homes would often bring an information sheet to several offices simultaneously. It was rare to have an exclusive listing, but if you did, you sure advertised that it was! In the early 80’s there was a feud between some of the offices. Some offices didn’t want to join the MLS and share their listings with other offices. They started their own organization called “Highlands Cooperative Listing Service.” They would share their listings only if they wanted to. You could ride through town and see on the front of the offices either “Member MLS” or “Member HCL.” That was doubly confusing to our clients!
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