I was considering a home purchase. Faced with the prospect of attending cattle calls at open houses looking for a residence promoted me to seek some referrals from my friends here in San Diego. Expecting at best a sparse response, I got instead a torrent of emails, texts, and VM's, some copying both me and their recommended (and even beloved) real estate guru, who of course now had me in their "How can I help you" sights. I've become a "prospect". Precisely an outcome I was hoping to avoid.
There is perhaps no industry this side of arms-dealing that typifies better in my mind the epicenter of rapacious, ethics-free materialism, gross ecological indifference and byzantine legalistic obfuscation than real estate. It is so irredeemably infused with an ethos of gratuitous hype, unctuous pandering and mind-numbing data dumps that I can scarcely stand hearing the term. Every time I hear people talking real estate there is a blizzard of statistical and financial terms being tossed on the table like chips in a game of poker. And I can't be the only one thinking that when we reduce the sacred landscape to parcels of real estate we deepen out alienation.
And yet, here it is. Maybe, just maybe, there's a better way?
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