A hundred years ago, I was in college. After a long and deliberate process of considering viable fields of study (involving a thoughtful analysis of the boy-to-girl ratios of each), I chose civil engineering. Engineering, it turns out, indeed involved a lot of boys but also a lot of numbers.
Mostly, though, it involved a lot of rules, or as we called them, equations. Remember the right equation for the right situation; plug; and play. That's how I tended to approach it. But then there was Sherman. He was in a different area of engineering -- the magic kind where you had to take certain things on faith, like the fact that a bunch of random wires carrying who-knows-what could actually power a blow-dryer -- or Bill Gates.
And maybe it was because of the more conceptual nature of his classes that Sherman didn't bother with memorizing the equations. He didn't rely on rules for finishing his homework. He just looked at the problem, started with what he knew to be true (those stupid numbers), and developed the solutions himself.
In 1983, Sherman was hired by a little start-up company that rhymes with "Qualcomm" and today is reportedly sipping fruity drinks on his own Mediterranean island. I eventually became a real estate agent. I will let you draw your own conclusions, but that's not the point.
Or maybe it is. The real estate industry is a big, bureaucratic, afraid-of-being-sued machine. So our brokers have their own equations: prescriptive procedures that we are required to follow in completing our homework. The gold star is the paycheck, and in order to get one of those things, most brokers thump their agents upside their heads with checklists until all of the basic reasoning skills run out both ears.
It all boils down to problems and solutions. Where checklists are concerned, the solution is always the same regardless of the actual problem, and that becomes the problem in itself. Pretty soon you find that you have established a culture of soldiers responding to executive orders instead of an organization of innovative, critical thinkers. And then we wonder why students in our major tend to fall a little to the left of the progressive curve.
That was a big lead-in to a small nit I have to pick, but come on, people. Think! Take our disclosures. Yes, we need them. Yes, many are statutory mandates. No, horizontal stripes are not becoming. But, don't be afraid to put on the old thinking cap once in awhile!
My favorite examples of real estate by rote come after closing. I recently got a call from an agent saying she had misplaced the buyer's loan prequalification letter. She needed it for her file ... in order to get paid. At this point, I am asking myself, "Why?"
The loan has funded. The deed has recorded. The buyer has already exchanged all of the socket wrench sets he received at his housewarming party for several bottles of tequila. Is there any question that he is qualified to get financing?
BUYER: "Your Honor, I submit that my home purchase should be voided and that I am entitled to damages because there is no evidence in the file that I am qualified for a loan."
JUDGE: "But you got a loan! On the other hand, there was a checklist. The court awards the plaintiff $40 million and a week on Sherman's island for pain and suffering."
One of my ongoing battles with the rational-thinking impaired is a California disclosure called the Seller's Property Questionnaire. This is a little disclosure that grew from three pages to four a couple of years ago. In doing so, it incorporated another disclosure, the Supplemental Statutory and Contractual Disclosures. At the risk of boring the socks off of you, the point is that today, if you use the former, you are also in effect using the latter.
It is a tidy little twofer deal. Except, in about half of our transactions, I get an 11th-hour call from the agent or their transaction coordinator saying they need both for their files in order to get paid. Forget that they really have both; they also have a checklist with an invisible yet implied advisory at the bottom cautioning against independent thought. The checklist always wins.
By Kris Berg
http://www.inman.com/buyers-sellers/columnists/krisberg/real-estate-checklists-gone-wild
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