by John Roach, SwitchYard Media
Nonagenarian George W. Johnson has been selling real estate in Seattle for more than 70 years and is still at his desk six mornings a week.
Buy a house today if you can, but don't sell one if you don't have to, says Johnson, a 97-year-old real-estate agent who has been working the Seattle market since 1936.
Johnson, who is reluctant to call himself America's oldest real-estate agent, has seen his share of housing booms and busts since he hung his first real-estate shingle 74 years ago.
"I've been through a lot of these ups and downs," he says, remembering the property boom that followed World War II, as well as the deep downturn in the 1970s when Seattle's biggest employer, Boeing, laid off thousands of workers.
Through it all, Johnson says he has learned many enduring lessons. Chief among them: After every housing recession, the market has "gone higher than the one before." You have to have the stomach to hang on through all of the twists and turns, he says.
Johnson wasn't always a real-estate guy. He was born to a farming family in South Dakota in 1912 and moved to Seattle at the height of the Great Depression to attend college and pursue a teaching career."
Then, in 1936, he started dabbling in real estate.
"You could have bought the best house in (the Seattle neighborhood of) Ballard for $3,500." Times were tough. The current real-estate market, Johnson says, is "a baby" by comparison.
Johnson, a natty dresser who drives himself to work every day — including Saturdays – managed to carve out a niche as a service-oriented agent. When the economy turned at the end of World War II, he opened up his own shop in Ballard, north of downtown Seattle. He and his sons have run George W. Johnson Realtors ever since.
"I've lost a lot of money in a lot of things, but I've never lost in real estate," Johnson says. He remembers selling his first house in the 1930s for about $1,500. "It's probably worth $300,000 now."
1. Beware one-company towns
Cities dependent on a single company or industry are more vulnerable to jarring downturns if the economy goes south. The Rust Belt's old factory towns have made that abundantly clear.
The Seattle market turned particularly grim in the late 1960s and early '70s when Boeing, the aerospace giant, laid off more than 60,000 people in the Seattle area.
Johnson counsels homebuyers to look beyond real-estate values and investigate an area's fundamental economy before making a purchase.
2. Don't get greedy
Johnson blames "plain old greed" for the latest real-estate downturn — people got caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment and banks egged them on with cheap loans.
"Everybody was out to buy a house, raise the price, double it and make a quick buck," he says, shaking his head. "People signed up for stuff that they knew they shouldn't have and they couldn't pay (for) and of course the banks helped them."
Johnson is old-school in that way. At the heart of his real-estate philosophy is his fundamental belief in personal responsibility. "You've got to be able to hang onto a house until conditions are such that you can make a little money," he says, emphasizing that each and every potential homebuyer should make an honest assessment of his or her financial potential and should be wary of offers that seem too good to be true.
"People aren't as dumb as the media is making them out to be. They knew what they were getting into," he says.
3. Timing is everything
"In this market, any young person that hasn't bought a house ought to buy one," Johnson says. "A buyers market doesn't come along that often … you just can hardly help but make money on whatever you buy today at the prices they are."
Johnson says rates are only going to go up over the long term, so borrowing will cost more.
4. If you don't have to sell, hang on.
Unfortunately, Johnson expects sellers to continue to suffer, at least for now. Buyers, on the other hand, "know it's a buyers market – they are going to come in with offers below what we've appraised it at just because they know a lot of people have to sell," he says.
Despite the continued housing-market struggles, Johnson is confident that the latest downtrend is largely over. "We are headed up," he says, "but like I said, I think it is going to be slow. It will take a year or two at least."