How a filmmaker became a real estate agent

Thirty years ago, when I moved back to Minneapolis from Los Angeles, it was not only for family, but career-wise. It was to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. I was a filmmaker, and at the time, Minnesota was an epicenter for independent film-making, as well as for large-scale Hollywood production. I got a job as membership director of the non-profit film organization Independent Feature Project, now called Film North, and in 1997, I wrote, produced and directed a feature film titled “Café Donna.” We sold out the Oak Street Theater for the film’s premier, and then I took it to the Independent Feature Film Market in New York – where it found absolutely no audience. I spent a year marketing the film, and in the end, I could not find a distributor, and the film died.
Like many other filmmakers of the time, I had run up tens of thousands of dollars on credit cards, rolling the dice and losing on my one big picture. I filed bankruptcy: a single dad with a four-year-old son.
Meanwhile, a good friend had started a business making Fire & Life Safety videos, the ones that instruct you on safety procedures, and on how to get out of a building in case of an emergency. But after producing hundreds of these safety videos, he had decided to change course. His father was one of the most well-like and highly regarded real estate brokers in Minnesota, and he decided to follow his father into the real estate business. On one of my friend’s final video projects, he hired me to assist him, and as we drove to Chicago together to make videos in three different skyscrapers, we talked extensively about real estate. I decided to follow him into it, and we both became realtors. In 2001, when the Twin Towers went down, I was proud to know that my friend had produced the Twin Towers Safety Videos that helped thousands of people get out of the buildings before they collapsed.
In the beginning, real estate felt like a consolation prize; my identity as an Artist was replaced by “salesman.” I felt like an overpaid chauffeur sometimes, waiting for my buyer to like a house enough to make an offer on it. Real estate is a relatively easy field to get into; the licensing and training can be completed in a matter of months. That said, there is hardly a field with more turnover. People come, people go. I often joke, “If you don’t know three Realtors, you don’t get out enough.” Getting a job, finding a client, was often harder than doing the job once you had earned someone’s faith.
But now, after 23 years, I’ve come to love this work. As an artist and writer, I’ve always valued the meaning of “house and home.” In fact, my somewhat famous great, great uncle, the everyman poet Edgar A. Guest, years ago penned a famous line that still lives on in our culture: “It takes a heap o’ livin’, to make a house a home.” I now see being a realtor as good, honest work; we help people with the biggest decisions of their lives, and I’ve come to be quite proud of it.
I’ve been blogging about real estate for years, and I plan on writing occasional real estate columns here for the Connector. Real estate is a dynamic topic, one that straddles the fields of economics and sociology and culture, and one constantly influenced by what’s happening in the world.
For instance, in Minneapolis, years of census data predicted a rising city population. The city responded with the 2040 plan to house the oncoming influx of people by encouraging developers to construct tall rental buildings, and by rezoning all single-family lots to allow for a triplex on each one. This rezoning was met with resistance, for many people feared that thousands of houses would immediately be torn down and replaced by triplexes. What was not always understood was that the building codes regarding size, both height and square footage, remained in place. So on a 40-foot-wide city lot, you can build one 2,100-square-foot house, or three 700-square-foot units. The house will be more valuable, so the market still encourages the single-family home.
We are heading into spring, and as the temperature rises, the market temperature will get even hotter. Inventory is extraordinarily low, and COVID-19 amped up people’s desire to get out of large rentals buildings. Meanwhile, remote-working created new housing demand; people started trading up to larger homes, with enough separate rooms for their kids and for one or two adults to office at home.
I’m looking forward to this spring market, because in fact, I love both competing and cooperating – and that’s what it takes to be successful in an imbalanced market like this. Many people think Realtors are getting rich these days, but what they don’t realize is that for every Realtor who helps someone buy a house, there are 20 who just lost a multiple offer. The number of Realtors who have a single listing these days far outnumber those with several buyers...
That said, agents with a balance of both buyers and sellers will be “entertaining” multiple offers about as often as they’re competing in them this season. In both cases, my opinion is that the job of the agent, now more than ever, is not only to develop our own methods and tips for handling multiples, but to develop our ability to “Team Up” with our own clients, as well as with others in the market.