I left the real estate brokerage business in 1998. After having sold my offices to Sotheby’s International Realty I worked for a year on a corporate level for Sotheby’s, helping to plan the expansion of their real estate business in the United States and in Europe.
Since then, in most ways, I’ve never looked back. I’ve never wanted to recapture the heady days of building and then selling my business. And I certainly have never wanted to be back in the trenches as an active broker. My connection in recent years has been as commentator, a journalist who writes about the intricate, immoderate, indulgent, extravagant and sometimes wacky world of the Hamptons. It’s an easy target for sarcasm and lampooning, and I don’t maintain a reporter’s distance from my subject. I include myself. I’m as besotted and moonstruck by our lifestyle as everyone else. I share the madness.
Curiosity got the better of me recently and I went underground—where you speak in whispers and nothing said is directly attributable—to interview some of the real estate pros who were around when I was there, in the salad days of locally run shops, and are still here now that the business is largely corporate and branded. How much has it really changed since I used to show up for work every day on Main Street?
It’s changed considerably. One broker told me, “We now have more brokers than customers, more brokers than houses. We have too many co- and tri-exclusives. We have systems and procedures. We have meetings on top of meetings. We have sales experts who give us pep talks on how to sell. We’re inundated with paperwork. It takes twenty minutes to delete all our junk mail and another twenty to listen to our cell phone, land phone, Blackberry messages and get all our corporate memos.”
The people I spoke to are the last of a generation of brokers. They are fellow dinosaurs with institutional memories. There is a new generation now that knows nothing and cares nothing about the camaraderie of the old days. Nor should they. They belong to a brave new world of real estate—regulated, orderly, standardized, straight and steady.