The charismatic President of the Australian Real Estate Institute, Tony Hitler (no relation), spells out in simple terms, the relationship of most agents to the public and the main goal of the real estate industry.
“Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”. Untrue in one thing. Untrue in everything.
"Augusto Pinochet, 91, Dictator Who Ruled by Terror in Chile, Dies" Times headline from December 11, 2006.
"Kim Il Sung, Enigmatic 'Great Leader' of North Korea for 5 Decades, Dies at 82." Times headline from July 10, 1994.
"It is unclear what role, if any, religion played in the attack Mr. Shnewer and the five other men are charged with planning." From a May 14 story by Alan Feuer on the "Fort Dix Six" terrorism suspects.
Fact: "The FBI first got wind of the alleged plot in January 2006, after an unidentified store clerk alerted police to a video that showed the men firing assault weapons, calling for jihad and yelling 'God is great' in Arabic, officials said." From the May 9 Washington Post.
"In a somewhat wooden address to the nation on Saturday and in an interview with the BBC on Sunday, Mr. Brown played down the threat, treating the episodes as a crime rather than a threat to civilization.
Yet, his minimalist approach seemed to strike a reassuring chord with Britons, many of whom had expressed fatigue with Mr. Blair's apocalyptic view of terrorism." Alan Cowell on new British PM Gordon Brown's mild response to terror attempts in London and Glasgow, July 4.
"The authorities have called the men Islamic extremists, but have not detailed exactly what role religion played in the plans they are accused of making. There has been no indication of involvement by the mosque here in Palmyra or another one in Philadelphia where four of the men occasionally prayed". Kareem Fahim, May 19.
Fact: "In Large Immigrant Family, Religion Guided 3 Held in Fort Dix Plot." Headline over Fahim's May 10 story.
I can’t recall where I got these groovy comparison quotes. But this is merely a random microscopic example of what passes for the usual levels of ‘journalistic standards’ of which there are exactly none in most of the MSM, meaning the mainstream media. "I say, old man. That's rather harsh! Surely there are some? Somewhere?" Nope, there are no real standards if they are all ultimately dismissable, and they are. Over and over again much of the media is the fickle friend of the elites and celebrities and thus the true enemy of the ordinary people.
Now dig, twisting, blatantly misrepresenting, censoring, lying and utter mediocre incompetence are the most common styles of presenting any reality to the general populace for er, their consumption. Security, along with health, money, finance and private property, are the absolute essential bedrocks of people’s lives, are they not? And I will tell you now, that along with other powerful and phony power groups made up of various degrees of liars and cheats, the MSM cons us 24 hours a day, seven days a week in virtually all areas. Why? For money, advertising, smug self-satisfied and largely unchallenged egos, enormous status and their hideous dumb ideology. It's the best they can do. Media is short for mediocrity.
We as the public consumers of said drivel are a lot like those little aphids that hang around on vegetation waiting passively to be milked by ants. "Hey! Aphid boy! Just sign here. You'll love it!"
The media do what they do because well, they can and there’s not a damn thing you or I can do about it. The absurdity and tedium of conspiracy theory bores me, but the empirical reality of relentless and systematic lies and deliberate or incompetent disinformation to keep so many uninformed, ripped off, defrauded, powerless and small, does well, interest me. Now kids, to narrow the example down to a manageable size, I’m going to stick to one disgustingly corrupt and fraudulent area that really hits home, literally. I’m talking about real estate, or more particularly the rotten to the core industry that simply vampires off what is often the only asset of ordinary people.
Let me say it again. The real estate industry is “is rotten to the core”. I quote the great Neil Jenman in his wonderful book, ‘Don’t sign anything! How to protect yourself from the tricks and traps of real estate’. First of all, real estate comes from “royal estate”, meaning ‘of the King’ and so on. But that changed with the advent of private property for free and private citizens. Mortgage means “until death” and for good reasons. Robert T. Kiyosaki is an oft semi-great source of analysis on this fundamental subject. Just remember, there are only a few areas of real wealth and they are ideas, business and real estate. All the rest are mere icing and shadows.
“There is nothing as costly as ignorance”. Horace Mann.
Someone said that newspapers sort the wheat from the chaff and print the chaff and they do. I used to read all the dailies er, daily. Then I found as I missed editions, it made little difference and finally with the Internet, none whatsoever. That was after I’d got my skimming skills up due entirely to the predictability of what I’d read. Everyday the world is new, but the news it seems, is such a context, analysis and depth free zone, that it's mostly presented either already stale or plain dead.
I now find most of the papers unreadable, the radio un-listenable and the TV un-watchable, beyond light entertainment and raw material for frustration. It’s simply not good enough and largely useless. That’s why the Net means the mainstream media lose one informed consumer at a time. It sickens me to consider that the highly controlled and pitifully rationed out to us media was for decades all many of us had growing up. Ugh. Anyway, if the media can deliberately cheat us for mutual benefit out of something as elemental as the value of our homes, even if ‘only’ by deliberate or incompetent omission, then there is I’m afraid, nothing they will not take from you or get entirely wrong. In short, it’s all lies to get your money or dumb misinformation because they actually can't do any better.
As in the media, the biggest lie in Real Estate is the quote lie. As Neil Jenman has said, the lie from which all others spring. Over quoting is known by agents as “buying the listing”. As Neil says, “In reality it’s fraud”. Agents lie from the beginning to the end by quoting the highest price to get your business, then begins the “conditioning”, to quote the REIV’s own manual of conmanship and defrauding, to get the price down and to get the useless to counter productive advertising costs up, which can be 40% of income for an agent. They don’t care how badly your house sells or what the experience is like for you. You are mere grist for the mill, sports.
Auction results are selectively quoted out of context and distorted by showing an above reserve price, when the truth is often that the buyer and other buyers would have paid more. Thus the recent fraud charges against both Sotheby’s and Christies. Even the rich have been sucked into the inherent failure and the fraud of auctions.
“You are the seller of a house, not the buyer of advertising. Paying an agent up front to find buyers is like “paying a butcher to find a cow”. Neil Jenman.
Advertising is mostly to promote the agents, generate income and to receive enormous bulk kickbacks from newspapers. Around seven years ago, the Herald Sun exposed ‘The Age’ for giving out massive bribes, some totalling $80,000 to get advertisers to move from the City Weekly. Items of real value have limited and focused advertising if any. The first rule of negotiation is to protect the value of the product.
As one 'savvy' customer puts it:“All costs should be included in the agent’s commission which should only be paid after your home has been sold for the best market price. As one savvy home seller commented ‘I pay an agent to deliver a service: the sale of my home for the best price. It’s the way I do business. It’s called COD: Cash On Delivery”.
If advertising works, why use an agent and not merely advertise yourself and use a solicitor? Because kickbacks and revenue for advertising makes the agent look successful, supports the print MSM monopolies and pays for the leases on agents prestige cars. That’s why. You are being had by the simple technique of repeating a lie in a big way.
“People believe a lie if it’s big and you repeat it”. Adolf Hitler.
Why don’t sellers get any guarantees of service in writing? Because they’ll get no service. Unless you have those guarantees that protect you and your often main asset, don’t sign anything.
One of the automatic, biggest and most common lies is that fraud in real estate is “isolated” and frowned upon by most agents and industry bodies. The entirely opposite is true. Most of the industry use these methods that are codified, endorsed and promoted heavily as “great” revenue and deliberate trickery devices by all REI’s. All REI’s are the same. Fraud is industry wide. Most of the well known names in real estate are not worth a damn to consumers and are capable of most anything to get your home listed, your obligation in writing and small print and thus your money.
Advertising is a giant and meaningless con whose generally stupid and counterproductive non-methods overexpose your home and reducing its value while providing blueprints for criminals. Open inspections are unscientific as is most agent blarney, and OI's are dangerously incompetent exercises designed for agents to get more seller listings as many people who will buy, are also selling. This is why agents mostly stand around with no information at all about the premises in question. They don’t need to give a damn. It’s also a great advertising revenue generator and another profiler for the agent.
The Real Estate Institute is an actively fraudulent organisation for protecting, enhancing and benefiting its many willfully incompetent, clueless and knowingly deceptive criminal members. Advertising is why newspapers criminally and in breach of clear legislation, omit facts about the industry from which they derive massive profits. In Australia, the media is controlled by a few families and groups, or run by the smug, unchallenged and untouchable. 95% of real estate agents and the industry they inhabit are either incompetent, dishonest, liars or unqualified and follow their own unbelievable guidelines that are in writing in their industries actual official manual that are a ‘How to’ of massively deceiving and ripping off the general public 24 hours a day and often into perpetuity.
Neil is a great guy and his advice is don’t sign anything. Everything changes after you sign allegedly “standard” agreements. It’s all a lie. You will have to pay the agent whether he ‘sells’ your house or not and if you use another agent or sell it yourself. All real estate contracts are to protect agents and not you. They are designed to get your money o matter what level of criminal, incompetent bastard the agent is. They will ALWAYS get paid even if you lose hundreds of thousands of dollars or go broke.
Why can’t you get a written guarantee on the quote? Because it’s usually a trick and a lie.
Always get independent financial advice and use the documents and agreements that he has supplied to protect the consumer. Real estate is the only business without a cooling off period. Auctions are a complete fraud and lie. A hammer going down is not a legal device, but mere theatre, as it all is, to trick sellers out of millions of dollars a day.
Auctions are “trickery and deception on a massive scale”. Neil Jenman.
You only need one buyer, not many. To get this, you need an agent with negotiating skills and ethics that you can trust. The structure, methods and guidelines used, as well as the level of public ignorance regards real estate make this highly unlikely to happen. Many agents work entirely on commission and have no incentive to not be cheats, liars and incompetent. Inspections are excellent open burglary tools with zero onus or accountability to agents! No police officer would have an open inspection.
“Auctions give agents massive control. Auctions get second best prices”. Neil Jenman.
The Real Estate Industry promotes fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, greed, persecution and cover ups on an enormous scale. It is a natural magnet for thousands of legal and illegal career criminals in ties who are mostly never called to account, punished or stopped. The REI manuals of every state in Australia are ‘how to guides’ in lying, cheating, gouging and trailing rip offs sometimes forever of the general public. With most agents, if an agent is talking, they’re usually lying. If they have anything written down, it’s merely always printed lies and deception.
The only thing I disagreed with Neil about, though not in principle, is his idea of doing things in an oddly old fashioned way, as if it’s still 40 years ago. This means that you mostly stay within the limited, extremely vulnerable single source of non-asset, non-investment employee, saving away like your Grandmother.
While I agree with caution and realism, it can merely be our perceptions of reality and not real at all. Being an employee is a somewhat dated er, paradigm. One I very much want to leave myself. Robert Kiyosaki has some very interesting things to say about what is for many ordinary people, an often hopeless and dated idea with very limited cash flow divided by time and tax. It’s being so old time, clueless of history, the reality of finance and the belief in such utter myths and nonsense like that of real estate agents, that gets people in such a jam in the first place.
Look, there’s an enormous amount of vital information on the truly awesome darkness and absolute organised legal and illegal crime of the “rotten to the core” industry that is real estate. Oh yes, and its printed cheering and protecting goon squad.
“They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV, and you think you’re so classless and clever and free. But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see”. John Lennon.
When it comes to the media and real estate, and security, money and health too, we are often naïve hicks and thus, get treated accordingly. Beyond the Net and the odd current affair bit, it’s extremely pertinent public interest information and the book itself is rarely allowed to be advertised in much of the printed media.
Read ‘Don’t Sign Anything’ by Neil Jenman. No really. Now!
Good old Nelli will show you the frightening and ugly reality of a mostly disgusting industry and how to deal with the freaks in it, or how to buy and sell real estate without an agent at all. A small step for you, a giant step for the public. Neil is now independently ‘retired’ in a fashion, having mostly sold his business. He now works often virtually pro bono as an advocate and has helped many of us plebes personally. He is in short, a damn decent and courageous guy. Go Neil!
Source: ‘Don’t sign anything: How to protect yourself from the tricks and traps of Real Estate’ by Neil Jenman. To contact a Jenman Approved Agent, call toll free 1800 1800 18. Or visit jenman.com.au. The Jenman company will also be pleased to hear any comments or of any real estate stories from you at: comment@jenman.com.au
http://www.jenman.com.au/AboutNeil.php
Neil Jenman c/- Rowley Publications
25/7 Anella Avenue
Castle Hill NSW 2154 Australia
neilj@jenman.com.au
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