Canada Day. Yahoo! Despite your current anger over – pick one – the HST, Don Cherry, bagpipes, the designated hitter in baseball or my personal favourite – service providers who say they’ll be at your home between 9 and noon – despite them all, we’re pretty lucky to be living in the best country in the world.
And it is luck, not skill. Unless you’re an immigrant who consciously decided on Canada versus – oh I don’t know – Greece?
I mention Greece because of an email I received on April 30, from the “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it any more” department. “I’m getting ready to participate in a revolution…Did you hear about the generic drugs in Ontario, increased hydro by eight per cent AND to top it off, HST? Maybe I’ll move to Greece or someplace where they don’t pay income taxes. Maybe I can find a little island somewhere where they never heard of government.”
To be fair, this Canadian Realtor was considering Greece before the protesters burned a bank and several employees in early May. Now they are no doubt rethinking their choice – Zimbabwe? Perhaps I can help. I wrote this column about 11 years ago about a couple of immigrants who chose Canada.
My Mom and Dad.
My mother was a licensed Realtor in and of the province of B.C. for 30 years. But as an unlicensed practitioner, buying on her own account, she’d been in the business for 30 years before her first license in 1958. She and I were snowbound in the great west coast snow of ‘96, with my brother and sister and wife stuck in various places in Western Canada, but not with us. For two quiet days, our reading and eating and video watching was interspersed with anecdotes about her 82 years in “the show”.
She was born in 1915 to a butcher and his wife, in a small town on the outskirts of Manchester, England. A well meaning neighbour with a home formula for rosy cheeks encouraged my grandmother to feed my mother fresh-squeezed beef blood. Worms, then rickets followed. Such was the tenuous circle of life in Britain during the First World War.
Having survived everything the neighbours and the post-war could throw at her, she finished school and ultimately got a job with Robertson’s, the jam and marmalade manufacturer still occupying grocery shelves in Canada. (Silver Shred rules!) There she met my father and experienced the production line. As she and I were putting labels on a batch of wine bottles, she remembered young women, slapping on jam labels every two seconds, for an eight-hour shift.
She married my father and began her unofficial real estate career buying a small cottage for about 450 pounds sterling. Dad was by then in the army and Mom had joined the police. Dad would come home and find his bride, nose in the paper, looking for housing bargains.
While her brothers and sisters stayed put – some were still in the same homes 40 years later – Mom and Dad were frequently on the move. By the time my sister and I had come along, our immigration to Canada in 1951 was financed from the equity in their last home.
When we settled in Campbell River, B.C., home of the Tyee (it’s a fish!) we didn’t rent for long. In fact, moving seemed for us kids to be a way of life. Houses and land for subdivision were the investments Mom and Dad made in addition to Dad’s job with the credit union and Mom’s part-time forays into waitressing and running a kindergarten. In 1957, she decided to get into the real estate business on a professional level and became only the second woman to take the then new pre-licensing course, where the assignments and exam were written longhand.
Her first agent was a woman. Her first sale was an island in Discovery Passage. Her first experience with a lawyer, illustrative. He complained her commission of $500 was more than he could charge for the conveyance, after university and three years of law school. Her reply was typical of her quiet, dignified sense of humour. “Did you always want to sell real estate then?”
Thirty years of unparalleled service followed – in Campbell River until 1970 and then, as a widow, in Victoria until 1988. On her retirement, she was the second oldest woman selling real estate in the capital city, withdrawing only to pursue a new career – a second marriage.
Widowed three times, she had six addresses in Victoria – one house, one patio home and four condos – not to mention a few investment rentals along the way, a condo in Maui and one in Florida. After retirement, she volunteered to host open houses in new projects.
Until she died at 92, she embodied the CREA Code of Ethics preamble: “Under all is the land. Upon its wise utilization and widely allocated ownership depend the survival and growth of free institutions and of our civilization.” She always left something on the table for the next buyer and frequently, instead of cutting her commission, left it on the title as a mortgage. Product knowledge and the instant ability to get people to like and trust her were her skills.
My mother, the Realtor. Thanks Mom. For, among many other things, picking Canada.
Happy Canada Day.
You can follow Marty Douglas on Twitter 40yrsrealestate or on LinkedIn and on Facebook. He is a managing broker for Coast Realty Group (Comox Valley) Ltd., with offices on Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast of B.C. Marty is a past chair of the Real Estate Errors and Omissions Corporation of B.C., the Real Estate Council of B.C. and the B.C. Real Estate Association. He’s a current director of the Vancouver Island Real Estate Board. [email protected]; 1-800-715-3999.
