It was towards the end of 1992 and Cullen and I had quit our jobs at the Bicycle Club. We were playing a little poker to supplement our income. He was doing really well but I was struggling. I felt like I wanted to do something else but I wasn’t quite sure what it was.
Sometimes on Sundays we would drive around and look at open houses. We even talked about buying something in the area but we never pursued it strongly. Since this was usually a fun thing to do, I decided that maybe we should become real estate agents. I thought that holding open houses on weekends would be a lot of fun and we would be working for ourselves, not someone else. Cullen was not crazy about the idea but he wanted me to be happy, so he agreed.
We both took the required tests and got our real estate licenses. We joined up with a company called “My Real Estate Co., Inc.” in Downey, California. We were Century 21 Agents, gold jackets and all. We did cold calls and knocked on doors, trying to get prospective sellers to list with us. This was nowhere near the glamour that I had imagined. Once we did get the listings, the open houses were not quite as much fun as I had imagined either.
Cullen and I were probably the most attentive Realtors that ever worked in the real estate field. If someone wanted a particular kind of house, we would spend weeks looking at every possible house to find the perfect one for our clients. After that we would spend weeks taking them to all of the possible options that we had found for them. Often, after weeks of work, they decided not to buy.
We did sell some houses during the year. Unfortunately, we got into the real estate business when the values on houses were going down and sellers were not happy. At the end of the year we decided that this wasn’t the career for us and we gave it up.
