The real estate and construction professions survive the annual legislative sessions because they have lobbyists who do their homework and they have strength in numbers - for instance, the huge attendance at Realtor Day in Tallahassee makes a deep impression on anyone whose career depends on getting people to vote for him.
We’ve done well under the current leadership. Senate President Jim King and House Speaker Johnnie Byrd have been there when needed and nothing awful has happened.
It’s going to get better because a real estate agent is poised to take over as president of the Florida Senate.
We’ve had licensees in seats of power but almost all have been people who just hold a license. Now, it’s our turn.
You may not have heard of Sen. Ken Pruitt of Port St. Lucie. You will, and let’s appreciate him.
He’s a few years shy of 50, makes his living selling homes as an agent for JoAnn Allen Real Estate, has a picture-perfect family and someday may be the state’s governor.
We aren’t two-for-two, though. The next speaker of the house will be Mario Rubio of Miami. A lawyer.
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I’ll admit that two of my favorite comic strips are Hi and Lois (family humor) and Dilbert (workplace humor.)
Coincidentally, we feature those two this month because they’re involved with real estate. I’m a comic strip nut (sadly, too many aren’t humorous and shouldn’t be allowed on the “funny pages”) because I have a bit more than a passing fancy with the most popular strip ever.
My late stepfather, Jim Raymond, was the artist for Blondie. He worked for the strip’s originator, Chic Young, and our home often was a winter stopover for the major cartoonists of the day (we lived in Delray Beach, which meant we were on the Freeload Road for yankees escaping the weather including Mort Walker, whose Lois is the hero of many agents.
It was fascinating to watch my stepfather work. Young would mail the ideas and Jim would draw. He had an easel in the den and, as long as I sat quietly, I could watch the oh-so-familiar characters appear. He seemed to always be right on deadline and many evenings I would be the delivery boy, driving as fast as I could to the Miami airport to get the strips on their way to King Features in New York City.
Hi and Lois is much like Blondie. The strips both feature very American families caught up in the vagaries of daily life. Both are centered around a married couple with reasonably normal children. No one gets older, though the strips change with the times.
Dilbert is way away from that, though it maintains its dark humor without an in-your-face attitude of others. It, too, hits true with many of us who must put up with oddball co-workers and management whims (as if we were void of oddities or whims ourselves.)
Comics and real estate? Why not ... even if Dogbert wasn’t what we had in mind.
- Fred Seely is the editor of Realty/Builder Connection and editorial director of Bailey Publishing
& Communications Inc. He can be reached at