Brock Realty Los Angeles

Posted onNovember 23, 2011 - 9:22 pm by Admin | 0 Comments

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KAI RYSSDAL: We spent some time in the subprime world up at the top of the broadcast and what the whole mess might mean for the real estate market. One part of that market we haven't talked about much is real estate brokers. Wasn't that long ago a broker could sell a house without even trying too hard. Marketplace's Lisa Napoli explores the new reality for realtors in the once red-hot market known as Greater L.A.

LISA NAPOLI: For the six years Brock Harris has been in real estate in the trendy Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake, houses have been practically selling themselves. Now he's learning to live with the subprime mess. Sales are down 33 percent from last year. Sellers are in shock. Buyers are biding their time.

BROCK HARRIS: It's like a really bad junior high dance. No one's doing anything. Everyone's just standing around.

On the other side of town, in super-pricey neighborhoods like Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, houses are still selling. But the bidding wars are long over and many homeowners are in denial.

Broker Steve Moritz says one listing he's got hasn't moved because the sellers haven't faced reality. They're still hoping to get what their house would have commanded a year ago.

STEVE MORITZ: What they say is they don't want to drop their price, but bring me an offer. They're willing to sell it for less but I'm not allowed to market it for less.

To make money, brokers have to spend it. They shell out thousands of dollars to advertise the properties they represent. There are newspaper ads, websites, glossy brochures. And then there's the time -- they have to man the open houses. Investing all that money and energy into something that isn't priced to sell doesn't make sense. Moritz says it's influencing the listings he accepts.

MORITZ: To take a property that you feel is maybe overpriced, maybe we'll think twice about that. Whereas in the past we were willing to give it a shot because there were a lot of properties that were selling at numbers that we didn't think would actually happen.

Those wild prices attracted a lot of people to the real estate business, they thought if they became agents, they could make a buck -- a very big buck -- quick. Now that the speculators and flippers have been driven out of the market by the disappearance of cheap, quick subprime loans, there's not enough business to go around.

Southern California real estate titan Fred Sands shocked a recent gathering of the California Association of Realtors. He said brokers who aren't making sales have to face reality:

FRED SANDS: Leave the business.

Realtor Brock Harris is in it for the long haul. But for now he's learning what it means to wait.
Take this two-bedroom fixer he's listed in trendy Echo Park. It's been on the market for five months. The price has been slashed $50,000 to $399,000. Still, no one will bite.

HARRIS: This is the kind of thing that a first-time buyer in the last five years ... they would have been fighting for this.

Finding buyers now isn't easy. And when you do, they may have trouble getting financing. But Fred Sands says this doesn't mean the real estate business is dead. Just sobering up.

SANDS: People can still buy homes. They have to be able to afford them. It's the old fashioned way.

In Los Angeles, I'm Lisa Napoli for Marketplace.

3. The question I get asked most often is, Where do you get your ideas? I never do a good job of answering that. I usually say something vague about how people tell me things, or my editor, Henry, gives me a book that gets me thinking, or I say that I just plain don’t remember. When I was putting together this collection, I thought I’d try to figure that out once and for all. There is, for example, a long and somewhat eccentric piece in this book on why no has ever come up with a ketchup to rival Heinz. (How do we feel when we eat ketchup?) That idea came from my friend Dave, who is in the grocery business. We have lunch every now and again, and he is the kind of person who thinks about things like that. (Dave also has some fascinating theories about melons, but that’s an idea I’m saving for later.) Another article, called “True Colors,” is about the women who pioneered the hair color market. I got started on that because I somehow got it in my head that it would be fun to write about shampoo. (I think I was desperate for a story.) Many interviews later, an exasperated Madison Avenue type said to me, “Why on earth are you writing about shampoo? Hair color is much more interesting.” And so it is. The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean ischallenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting. We flip through the channels on the television and reject ten before we settle on one. We go to a bookstore and look at twenty novels before we pick the one we want. We filter and rank and judge. Wehave to. There’s just so much out there. But if you want to be a writer, you have to fight that instinct every day. Shampoo doesn’t seem interesting? Well, dammit, it must be, and if it isn’t, I have to believe that it will ultimately lead me to something that is. (I’ll let you judge whether I’m right in that instance.) The other trick to finding ideas is figuring out the difference between power and knowledge. Of all the people whom you’ll meet in this volume, very f Ghd pas cher ew of them are powerful, or even famous. When I said that I’m most interested in minor geniuses, that’s what I meant. You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world. My friend Dave, who taught me about ketchup, is a middle guy. He’sworked on ketchup. That’s Page 6 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html He held it in the air as if he were holding up a Tiffany vase.That’s where you find stories, in someone’s kitchen on the Jersey Shore. 4. Growing up, I never wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a lawyer, and then in my last year of college, I decided I wanted to be in advertising. I applied to eighteen advertising agencies in the city of Toronto and received eighteen rejection letters, which I taped in a row on my wall. (I still have them somewhere.) I thought about graduate school, but my grades weren’t quite good enough. I applied for a fellowship to go somewhere exotic for a year and was rejected. Writing was the thing I ended up doing by default, for the simple reason that it took me forever to realize that writing could be ajob. Jobs were things that were serious and daunting. Writing was fun. After college, I worked for six months at a little magazine in Indiana called theAmerican Spectator . I moved to Washington, DC, and freelanced for a few years, and eventually caught on with theWashington Post — and from there came toThe New Yorker . Along the way, writing has never ceased to be fun, and I hope that buoyant spirit is evident in these pieces. Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else’s and says, angrily, “I don’t buy it.” Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you’ll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head — even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’d really like to be. I Ghd lisseur ’ve called these pieces adventures, because that’s what they are intended to be. Enjoy yourself. PART ONE OBSESSIVES, PIONEERS, AND OTHER VARIETIES OF MINOR GENIUS “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” The Pitchman RON POPEIL AND THE CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAN KITCHEN 1. The extraordinary story of the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ begins with Nathan Morris, the son of the shoemaker and cantor Kidders Morris, who came over from the Old Country in the 1880s, and Page 7 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html In the postwar years, many people made the kitchen their life’s work. There were the Klinghoffers of New York, one of whom, Leon, died tragically in 1985, during theAchille Lauro incident, when he was pushed overboard in his wheelchair by Palestinian terrorists. They made the Roto-Broil 400, back in the Ghd france fifties, an early rotisserie for the home, which was pitched by Lester Morris. There was Lewis Salton, who escaped the Nazis with an English stamp from his father’s collection and parlayed it into an appliance factory in the Bronx. He brought the world the Salton Hotray — a sort of precursor to the microwave — and today Salton, Inc., sells the George Foreman Grill. But no rival quite matched the Morris-Popeil clan. They were the first family of the American kitchen. They married beautiful women and made fortunes and stole ideas from one another and lay awake at night thinking of a way to chop an onion so that the only tears you shed were tears of joy. They believed that it was a mistake to separate product development from marketing, as most of their contemporaries did, because to them the two were indistinguishable: the object that sold best was the one that sold itself. They were spirited, brilliant men. And Ron Popeil was the most brilliant and spirited of them all. He was the family’s Joseph, exiled to the wilderness by his father only to come back and make more money than the rest of the family combined. He was a pioneer in taking the secrets of the boardwalk pitchmen to the television screen. And, of all the kitchen gadgets in the Morris-Popeil pantheon, nothing has ever been quite so ingenious in its design, or so broad in its appeal, or so perfectly representative of the Morris-Popeil belief in the interrelation of the pitch and the object being pitched, as the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie &BBQ , the countertop oven that can be bought for four payments of $39.95 and may be, dollar for dollar, the finest kitchen appliance ever made. 2. Ron Popeil is a handsome man, thick through the chest and shoulders, with a leonine head and striking, oversize features. He is in his midsixt


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