A skillfully written and emotionally engaging account of buying and selling houses.
A veteran real estate agent shares stories and lessons from her career.
In this professional memoir, Sheehan, the author of Wang Kuo-Wei: An Intellectual Biography(1986), recounts tales from her years in residential real estate—her second profession, following an academic career focused on Chinese history. The stories in this book range from the mundane to the absurd to the heartwarming, and Sheehan uses them to explain her overall philosophy of real estate success and also to counsel readers who may be considering the purchase or sale of a house themselves. The book explores the challenge of being both a salesperson and a therapist for some clients, the difficulties involved in bringing all parties together for an agreement, and the satisfaction of developing one’s knowledge and skills over the course of many years. The clients in these stories, who are fully anonymized, represent a wide variety of personalities, motivations, and financial situations. Her fellow realtors are variously portrayed as allies, opponents, or merely marking time until retirement, and Sheehan makes it clear that she has little patience for those who don’t share her sense of ethics and professional responsibility. But although some of the tales here focus on bad behavior, the book never takes a salacious or gossipy tone, and Sheehan's evident sympathy for her clients—even when their indecisiveness and capriciousness cost her time and money—turns even the most outrageous accounts into object lessons.
Sheehan is a proficient storyteller, and she turns her tales of last-minute negotiations, questionable septic systems, and stubbornly overpriced fixer-uppers into high drama: “I had never seen fungus on an interior wall before,” she notes at one point, “much less redfungus.” The book is informative as well as entertaining, and readers will come away with solid knowledge about home inspections and contingencies, purchase and sale agreements, and the intricacies of setting a correct price when a property enters the market. Buying or selling a home is as much an emotional transaction as a financial one, and Sheehan gives full weight to the significance of the process for all parties involved. She also displays a soft spot for the houses themselves, arguing that a buyer or seller may be wrong about a place’s worth, but the house itself is never at fault. The author’s repeated references to the prestigiousness of various properties can be grating; one, for instance, is described as being “on Crestview Lane, one of my sales region’s most desirable addresses,” and several others are noted as being “upscale” or “luxury” homes. However, these descriptors can also be taken as evidence of Sheehan’s clear pride in her work. The book’s tone also tends toward the extravagant (“Aside from a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, is there anything more beautiful than this?”), but it generally avoids melodrama and makes for a fast-paced and enjoyable read. Overall, she manages to turn even the most difficult parts of the real estate process into good stories.
A skillfully written and emotionally engaging account of buying and selling houses.Pub Date: May 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64704-329-2
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Canterbury Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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