13.3 Investigación
13.3.3 Implementación manual
A Type Number Two is treacherous, not only because he is hard to recognize, but because he’s a meat eater—in fact, the most vicious of all carnivores. To put it in perspective, think of it this way: A Type Number Two is to the Businessworld Jungle as Tyrannosaurus Rex is to Jurassic Park. Because he’s cunning, a Type Number Two can sometimes be mistaken for either a Type Number One or Type Number Three. Deviousness is his stock in trade.
It was not until I had completed Anti-Deceit Measures 401 with my Type Number Two professor that I was prepared to graduate from Screw U. Not that I had never encountered a Type Number Two before. It’s just that in the past I had failed to recog-nize members of this cannibal sect for what they really were, let alone study their sinister methods.
Like his fellow faculty members, Types Number One and Three, my Type Number Two professor at Screw U. was not only a perfect model of his species, but a great teacher as well. He was co-owner of an apartment-development company that had built a significant number of large apartment projects in the Midwest and on the East Coast. My initial contact with him came about as a result of making cold calls in an effort to solicit new second-mortgage deals. He expressed an immediate interest in meeting with me, and I made an appointment to come visit him.
When I went to his office for our first face-to-face discussion, I was impressed to the point of being in awe. My Type Number Two professor spent an inordinate amount of time expounding on the virtues of dealing only with people who possessed buckets of integrity and the highest ethical standards—like himself, for example—an almost sure sign that the person with whom you are speaking is a rapist, murderer, or, worst of all, an unethical real estate developer. To boot, he casually tossed around the names of a sampling of competitors as examples of people whom he con-sidered to be of questionable repute.
Talk about holier than thou, my new mentor was in a class by himself. And talk about gullible, The Tortoise ate up every
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To Be or Not to Be Intimidated?Copyright © Robert J. Ringer 2006 www.robertringer.com
word. I hadn’t been so enamored since the first time I had laid eyes on my beloved Court Holder in organic chemistry lab years earlier. I once again found myself conjuring up fantasies of an au-tographed picture hanging over my hearth. I sat there listening to his fecal chatter as though I had just undergone a discount lobotomy, nodding my head up and down on cue to show that I was in total agreement with such clichés as, “Life is too short to deal with unethical people.” I oohed and aahed as he name-dropped big institutions that had financed some of his projects or supposedly wanted to lend him money for future develop-ments. He was wearing a white hat so tall that it nearly touched the ceiling, and his Saddam-like grin had the aura of a neon sign flashing the words, “Trust me.”
When we finally got down to talking business, he said that his company “could possibly use a couple million dollars to take ad-vantage of some other opportunities.” (Unbeknownst to me at the time, this was wheeler-dealer code for: “I’m in desperate financial straits, and need a quick cash injection to avoid bankruptcy.”)
My Type Number Two professor mentioned that he owned a large apartment development in St. Louis, and that he might be interested in selling it outright rather than obtaining a second mortgage. He indicated, however, that it would take a purchase price in the area of $10 million for him to seriously consider sell-ing. Here, too, I was too much of a neophyte to understand that no matter how convincing a prospective seller may appear to be about not being interested in selling his property for less than a certain price, he is almost always either lying or will eventually cave in and lower his price when a serious buyer enters the pic-ture. Nothing changes a seller’s view of the world quicker than a checkbook being waved in his face.
As my Type Number Two professor continued to pontificate, I did some rough figuring and concluded that if I was successful in selling his property, I could earn a commission in the area of
$200,000-$300,000 based upon the Board of Realtors’ suggested commission scale. Such thinking only served again to demon-Type Number Two Isn’t Sorry
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“Listen up, greenhorn, it’s important to deal only with people of integrity––like me, for example.”
Copyright © Robert J. Ringer 2006 www.robertringer.com
strate how much of a greenhorn I was at the time. I simply wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand that sellers could care less what a Board of Realtors thinks their members’ commissions should be.
Nonetheless, I was excited about my first opportunity to get a shot at earning a jumbo-size commission. I told my Type Num-ber Two professor that I was confident I could find a buyer for his St. Louis apartment development if he would furnish me with the necessary data. I gave him a long list of items I thought I would need in order to put together a proper presentation, and he agreed to have his staff compile the information and get it to me within a week or so.
Now, all I needed was a little something in writing from him and I would be all set. Sadly, however, I was so intimidated by his arrogant, self-righteous attitude that I was very meek in request-ing a written understandrequest-ing regardrequest-ing my commission. As I ver-bally stumbled around like the world-class reptilian wimp that I was, he interrupted me and commenced another sanctimonious lecture. He so dynamically emphasized his unparalleled reputa-tion for honesty and integrity that I actually felt ashamed that I had dared to ask for a signed agreement. In the privacy of my mind, I chastised myself for being so disrespectful, for having the gall to ask this towering model of morality for a written docu-ment. Didn’t I realize that when you deal with a man of such unparalleled integrity, you don’t need anything in writing?
Clearly, my Type Number Two professor was the intimida-tor, and I was the intimidatee.
Backing off gracefully, I assured him that my asking for an agreement was only a formality, and that in his case I was not concerned about having something in writing. Fluttering my eye-lashes in blissful ignorance, I returned to my office and began lay-ing out a game plan to market my first major deal. After my Court Holder experience in organic chemistry class years earlier, I never thought I could become so infatuated again. Young love is Type Number Two Isn’t Sorry
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beautiful to behold, especially when you spend most of your life hiding inside a shell.
After I received all the facts and figures from my Type Num-ber Two professor’s office, I made arrangements to fly to St. Louis to personally inspect his property. There was big money involved, and I was determined to do such a first-class job in all aspects of this deal that the seller would actually feel good about paying my commission. (Yes, I am blushing a bright shade of green as I write this).
As quickly as possible, I sent letters to a number of the biggest real estate buyers in the country, briefly describing the St. Louis property and inquiring as to whether they might have an interest in an apartment development of this size. To those who answered in the affirmative, I sent a detailed presentation. Fi-nally, after about two weeks, I followed up with a phone call to each prospect.
One company, in particular, indicated a serious interest in the deal, which resulted in an exchange of numerous phone calls and letters between us. I then made my second critical mistake.
(The first, of course, was that I had allowed the seller to intimi-date me into believing that I had no need for a signed commission agreement.) Instead of registering the prospective buyer by certi-fied mail, I relayed offers and counter-offers between him and the seller by telephone. During this period, however, I did not men-tion the buyer’s name to the seller.
Then, the inevitable: My professor began to smell the aroma of money, and reared his chip-snatching Type Number Two head.
He told me that he had just returned from New York where he had met with someone who, by coincidence, worked for the buyer with whom I had been negotiating. He said that a mutual acquaintance had introduced him to the buyer, and that the buyer had informed him that he had been negotiating through me for the purchase of his St. Louis apartment development.
In classic Type Number Two fashion, the seller proceeded to tell me that he felt no obligation to me regarding a sale of his
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To Be or Not to Be Intimidated?Copyright © Robert J. Ringer 2006 www.robertringer.com
St. Louis property to my buyer, notwithstanding the fact that it was I who had submitted the property to him. The words honesty and integrity had suddenly disappeared from his vocabulary. True to his species, when the chips were on the table, he dropped his phony, self-righteous verbiage and warned me, in no uncertain terms, that I had better not reach for my chips.
I was stunned, demoralized, and confused. I tried to pull my-self together and take a firm stand, but the tougher I got, the nas-tier the my professor became. Finally, I committed one of the most unforgivable sins of deal-making: I began to press. That quickly brought the matter to a head, and from there things got very emotional. With a straight face, my professor argued that he had found out that I had simply “contacted a lot of prospective buyers” and that “anybody could do that.” Gee, and here I thought that’s what a real estate agent was supposed to do.
Although it was clear that I had been responsible not only for calling the buyer’s attention to the property, but for motivating his interest in it, the reality was that I was dealing from a position of weakness. Oatmeal brain that I was, I had no commission agreement with the seller, nor did I have so much as a certified letter showing that I had registered the buyer with the seller. All that I had were what the seller had originally told to me would be all that I would ever need—his honesty and integrity.
It was obvious that tiptoeing was not going to get me any-where, so I fell back on my ace in the hole that had landed me my first real estate commission—the $6,500 I had earned in the Cincinnati deal—and called my attorney into the fray. This time, however, I was dealing with a hard-core Type Number Two, an outrageous flaunter of white hats whose unspoken motto was:
Cheating isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!
When my attorney stepped into the picture, the seller and his in-house criminal (er, attorney) shamelessly laid their cards on the table, pointing out the third and most critical mistake I had made. Not only did I not have a signed commission agree-ment or a certified mail slip proving that I had registered the Type Number Two Isn’t Sorry
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buyer with the seller, I was missing the most important legal tool of all: a real estate license in Missouri, the state where the prop-erty was located.
The seller’s attorney gleefully informed my lawyer and me that, in fact, Missouri had a law prohibiting unlicensed per-sons from working on the sale of properties located within the state. Accordingly, in the event of a sale, a seller had no legal obli-gation to pay a commission to anyone who did not have a real es-tate license in Missouri, even if the agent was licensed in another state. My attorney quickly checked it out and confirmed that the seller’s attorney was absolutely right.
(This was my first recollection of having an instinctive liber-tarian thought. The idea that the government could anoint itself to have the power to ordain who should and should not be al-lowed to earn a living selling real estate seemed both oppressive and outrageous to me. Later in my career I was able to figure out why those who are already licensed—be they real estate agents, doctors, hair dressers, gambling casinos, or pimps—are almost al-ways in favor of ever tougher licensing laws: It keeps the compe-tition out! Welcome to the world of government licensing scams, Mr. T.)
I assessed the playing field, and quickly determined that what I was involved in here was nothing less than a legal mug-ging. In fact, had I not had the good sense to call in my attorney at the eleventh hour, I feel certain that I would have walked away from this repugnant experience chipless. It was only because of the Universal Attorney-to-Attorney Respect Rule that I ended up being given a “tip” from my Type Number Two professor. His at-torney told my lawyer that if I kept my mouth shut and stayed out of the way, his client would be generous and throw me a
$20,000 bone. Given that it was a bone or nothing, I chose the bone. It wasn’t the $200,000+ commission I had expected to re-ceive, but it certainly helped me to have an even greater apprecia-tion for the Universal Attorney-to-Attorney Respect Rule—an invaluable tool when employed on your behalf.
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To Be or Not to Be Intimidated?Copyright © Robert J. Ringer 2006 www.robertringer.com
My Type Number Two professor at Screw U. had taught me well. I had made one of the biggest apartment-development sales in the history of St. Louis, and walked away with but a token fee amounting to about one-fourth of one percent of the selling price of the property. I carefully analyzed my mistakes and concluded that in my first major deal I had been missing not one, not two, but all three of the legal tools a real estate agent needs to protect himself.
Because my professor had been such a master of his highly skilled craft, I felt confident that I could spot a Type Number Two pretty quickly in the future. I now recognized that whenever a person spent an inordinate amount of time expounding on the importance of honesty and integrity, it was a signal for me to pull out my can of roach killer or, preferably, avoid dealing with him at all. I also vowed that if someone refused to sign a commission agreement with me in the future—regardless of the reason—I would assume that he was a Type Number Two and walk away from the deal.
As with my organic-chemistry-class Court Holder many years earlier, I thank you, Type Number Two professor, wherever you may be. I vividly recall your telling me that you would like to do some building in warm weather climates, so I’m sincerely happy for you that you’re going to get your wish when you pass on to the next world.
Type Number Two Isn’t Sorry
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T
he St. Louis fiasco I discussed in the previous chapter (of-ficially listed in the Screw U. archives as “the Missouri Massacre”) was a major turning point in my career, be-cause it forced me to separate reality from wishes—the reality that the game of business is played in a jungle rather than on a nursery school playground; the reality that there are only three types of people in the business world, and that all three are out to get your chips; the reality that I had been dealing from a position of weakness and, as a result, had been repeatedly and unmerci-fully intimidated.I vowed that I would find a way to strengthen my posture, and that I would begin to earn, and receive, serious commis-sions. However, I had not yet determined just how to go about