The Blizzard Of Oz Without Walk-ins Or Snow

July 22, 2025

Time to read [7 minutes]

  • A Segue From A Personal Experience To Rock Music Is Underrated
  • ”Uptime” In A Real Estate Brokerage Office Is Underrated
  • Direct Interaction With Homebuyers Early On Is More Effective

If you like heavy metal music, this has been an event-filled couple of weeks with the historic last Black Sabbath concert on July 5th and images of Ozzy Osborne on his throne (a perfect solution since he wasn’t healthy enough to stand). We received sad news today, July 22nd, as I write this, that Ozzy has just passed away. I recall spending many of my summers as a teen toiling in the huge and hot kitchen of the old Avenue Restaurant in Rehoboth Beach. Located in LSD (Lower Slower Delaware) on the Atlantic Ocean, I made a minimum wage of $2.35 an hour in the late 1970s and lived on about four hours of sleep per night for an entire summer. It was worth it because the social life at the beach was great. I remember sharing record albums with the head cook, who was about five years older than me, a sort of tattooed nomad who returned every summer. We spent a lot of time playing Black Sabbath records, especially their second album and the last song they played at their last concert: Paranoid. I even learned that song on my electric guitar years ago (I’ve since retired) to the point that my youngest, then in diapers, would shout “Dad!” from his car seat when that song came on the radio. Proud dad. Paranoid has stood the test of time, and so did his commercials, unlike “uptime” in real estate brokerage offices (wow, what a segue!)

Source: Consequence of Sound

How Office “Uptime” Used To Work

In the mid-1980s, I worked briefly at a Century 21 office in a small town in the western suburbs of Chicago. Yes, I owned a gold polyester jacket. I had just quit my job working for a hospital services company in downtown Chicago, which Marriott had acquired. I was moving quickly up the corporate hierarchy, but had endured 90-hour work weeks for three years, while hearing bullets fired in the alley that my office overlooked. I had little passion for the work, so I took a real estate license class and quit my job. I wanted to go into real estate somehow, as my dad was a developer. When I became the second-ranked listing agent in the office in my first six months, I still knew that this was not going to be my career, but it was going to be fun. It was 1985 and I even bought a car phone for what seemed like a billion dollars but I attributed it to several home sales. The interaction with many people and being outside all the time was enjoyable. Keeping a buyer and seller from killing each other over an old lawnmower that could have broken the deal was also somewhat amusing. I applied my analytic skills to selling, and it worked.

My memory of the first official day at the Century 21 office is fuzzy, but I somehow managed to receive my lockbox key and agent license. The agent with the first “uptime” of the day introduced himself while holding a half-eaten glazed donut and a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. He was a nice guy, a veteran of middle management, but laid off as a casualty of the plunge in Midwest manufacturing. “Uptime” meant that the agent received all the inbound phone calls and walk-ins within a two-hour window. We were on the main street in town and received a steady flow of walk-ins. Each “uptime” position had a backup “uptime” position in case the first position was overloaded with incoming queries. This era was pre-Internet, and we relied on listing books and a super old listing terminal that looked like this. The agent I was backing up looked down the stairs from our upstairs perch and saw the next walk-in. He said to me, “its slow so why don’t you take the guy that just walked in. I’ve only got five minutes left and I’m going to grab some lunch.” I worked with the walk-in who looked disheveled and sold him a house that very day, my first day. It was the largest home sale of the month for the office, a whopping $92,500. Later that week, I backed up the same agent during his “uptime,” and I sold another house when he left early, so those greasy hot dogs and fries, in a paper bag from the local lunch stand, were starting to get pretty expensive. I think I did this 3-4 more times with other agents as a backup to their uptime. Soon, everyone learned NEVER to leave their “uptime” early when I was their backup.

How Agents Can Increase Walk-In Traffic

I was reading a Real Estate News agent article yesterday: Decoded: 5 things brokers can do to increase walk-in traffic [not behind a paywall] by an agent I met years ago (“pre-covery” is our inside joke), and he (J. Philip Faranda) makes the point that “walk-in business is dead.” In fact, I’ve repeatedly asked real estate agents around the country and they tell me the same thing. Faranda says that walk-ins haven’t returned since the pandemic: “Most agents don’t want to sit in an office alone when the only walk-in they’re likely to get is someone selling Girl Scout cookies, and potential clients aren’t inspired when they see a cubicle graveyard.” 

Direct human contact is always better than an internet lead. Faranda makes the following points:

  • Advertise Office Hours – No Appointment Required
  • Offer Free Mortgage Pre-Qualifications
  • Get A Notary License
  • Focus On Important Signage
  • Have Fun

It’s hard to think back 40 years and remember all the nuances of direct salesmanship in that main street office when we weren’t playing Nerf Basketball upstairs, hip-checking each other into the veneer paneling before broker tours and quoting “Mike Ferry (Tom’s dad), but I recall it being very effective if you knew your stuff (or had a good hook shot). The idea of avoiding face-to-face contact today until absolutely necessary seems almost unimaginable in the world I came from. 

Final Thoughts

I’m not sure how I connected Ozzy Osbourne’s untimely passing with working in a hot kitchen at a beach resort and my experiences with “uptime” as a realtor, but it kind of worked.

Please remember that I always want more than your hot dogs and fries.

The Actual Final Thought – Sometimes there’s a twist and you can’t see straight.

[Podcast] What It Means With Jonathan Miller

The latest episode, Technology And The Housing Hype Cycle, is just a click away. Also here’s another interview I did earlier this week: Monday Mojo: A Market Conversation You Need to Hear – Jonathan Miller! The podcast feeds are located below:

Apple (Douglas Elliman feed)   Soundcloud  Youtube

Monday Wednesday Mailboxes, Etc. – Sharing reader feedback on Housing Notes.

July 14, 2025: Remember When iBuyers Were Going To Rule The World?

  • With all of the tech nonsense and easy answers, for me, the RULES still govern successful and profitable investing. Nothing can substitute for in-depth knowledge of the pragmatic actualities concerning each transaction, as well as a complete commitment to “no holes bared” due diligence, that follows what I call my First Rule of Real Estate.
  • “Every Seller is a Liar, and every Deal is a Bad Deal”. 

Did you miss the previous Housing Notes?

July 17, 2025

Florida Housing Markets And The Higher Mortgage Rate Threat

Image: Miller Samuel

Housing Notes Reads

Market Reports

Extra Curricular Reads