It's rather amazing what a bit of humor and imagination can do in business. Take, for example, a friend of mine starting his own small realty office. One of the first properties listed with him was a house really needing repairs. The ad he went with stated: "The ideal home for the do-it-yourselfer. Needs a little work, but the price is right." Then he listed the price and added, "Comes with a brand new hammer, free of charge." It sold quite quickly.
Even more of a smiler was the ad in a Texas paper in an air base town: "Five dollars reward for furnishing house or apartment for officer's family. Have twin boys, aged 3, but will drown them if you insist. Dial ,,,,".
On the other hand, there are more elite realtors. One ad from such a one awhile back in Greenwich Village stated, "Loveliest old house of West Fourth, $30,000, four floors filled with priceless antiques, furniture, drapes, china, etc. Shown only to Americans of class."
It never hurts to list those extras. Note the ad for a "Modern house with four bedrooms, 3 baths and rumpus room in the cellar. Extra attraction: the family next door is building a swimming pool."
It was only a short time after that ad appeared that a sign appeared on that property, stating only, "Too Late!"
Perhaps the oddest ad I've come across was listed by a Mr. Norman Pickersgill in Wakefield, England. He was trying to sell his bathroom. The catch was that - though it had modern equipment and was a neat little rustic brick structure with a red tiled roof - it stood all alone in the middle of a 3 1/2-acre field.
The realtor explained that Norman, a grocer, used to live in a trailer in that field and, since the trailer didn't boast a bathroom, he had spent 400 pounds ($1,200) building one adjacent.
But the previous month Norman had moved into a house and he wanted to sell the field - but whoever buys it has to take the bathroom too.
Another offbeat ad was in the Stanford University daily newspaper: "Wanted: large house for 47 young men. Must have 16 different addresses." Responses were to be directed to the house manager of a fraternity group who had been forbidden, after an unusually boisterous long-lasting party, "to allow more than three members to live at the same address".
Sometimes the most simple-seeming ads have the wildest background stories. A soft sell ad from the real estate page of London's Observer listed: "Victorian residence in fashionable Chelsea. Lease 51 years. Bargain: 7850 pounds." Some scamp on the staff visited the site and was moved to josh the rest of the story.
"This squat, rather repellent early Victorian lower middle class residence offers to the dull and comfortably off an interesting background of squalor previously available only to the very poor. The decor, where it is not garish cheap wallpaper, is a fashionable mud brown - or is it only dirt? The intercommunicating doors of the two rather mean living rooms have been torn away, giving one a 26-foot room for parties, with a lavatory basin conveniently placed at one end where one can wash one's hands after greeting the dirtier guests. Six other rooms. The kitchen sink, in the corner of most of them, lends a touch of social realism. A particularly foul subterranean bathroom, with antique bath, coal-fired clothes broiler. I could find only one lav, but there is a small foul patch of earth behind house, which only an English Estate Agent would call a garden, wherein, as Swift put it, a woman could "pluck a rose".
Idt takes all kinds, even in the realtor profession!
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