Tom’s Career Turns 30
1995: Jerry Garcia passed away, Michael Jordan returned to the NBA, everyone was dancing the Macarena, E.R. and Seinfeld were hot on network T.V… and a young Tom Hume passed his real estate exam and hung his license at Pinnacle Peak Realty in Scottsdale, AZ.
The world was very different and so was real estate! Older agents lugged around listing books filled with homes for sale. They were accustomed to being the gatekeepers of real estate information in an era before Realtor.com or Zillow. If you wanted to know what was for sale you asked an agent to look it up in the ol’ listing book! But I was the whiz-kid in the office who knew how to work MS-DOS and the dial-up modem to connect the company’s 486 IBM compatible personal computer to the ARMLS system now posting basic listing information… but no property photos yet. I remember taking pictures of homes and carrying the film to be developed so that a few days later I would have something to show prospective buyers.
A pager was clipped to my belt. That belt held up a pair of khaki Dockers into which I tucked a short sleeve golf shirt; my uniform of that era. I drove buyers around to show them homes (mostly in the golf communities around north Scottsdale). We only wrote offers face-to-face in the absence of Docusign. My clients had to press hard when they signed because there were several extra copy pages with carbon pages between each. Everyone in the deal got a carbon copy.
So much changed in the decades that followed. I stopped wearing a pager… and Dockers. But aside from huge changes in how we operate day to day, probably the most important change was this notion of the Realtor as the gatekeeper of information. We now understand that our clients count on us not for a list of what homes are for sale, but to light the way through every stage of the real estate transaction, to help make a stressful process a lot less stressful!
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