If selling real estate were just about real estate — about zero down and 3 bdrms up and owner financing and updated appliances — Rhoda Ramsey would have never stuck with it all these years.
But Ramsey learned early on what the best realtors always do: that selling real estate is really about getting mixed up with other people's lives.
"Every aptitude test I took in college said I should be a social worker," says Ramsey. "And social work is what I did for 36 years."
For most of that time, Ramsey has been an institution in Salt Lake City. Now — 36 years, two dog bites and a lot of social work later — Ramsey is calling it quits.
"People can't believe I'm retiring," she says. "They think I must have some terminal disease. But would you still want to be working when you're 73?"
Ramsey got her real estate license in 1964. It took her six months to sell even one house. "Most people would have given up, but it just made me mad." Four years later she was named "salesman" of the year by the Salt Lake Board of Realtors, an honor a Realtor can only win once in a career. She was the first woman to ever win the award.
But it was that first sale in 1964 that was emblematic of the Ramsey style. Her clients that autumn were looking for a house close in; their only stipulation was that it had to have a formal dining room.
All the houses with formal dining rooms, though, somehow came up short. So Ramsey decided to go with her own intuition about what the couple really wanted in a house. It didn't have a formal dining room — but the couple fell in love with it anyway and 36 years later are still there.
More often that not, says Ramsey, she'll know what kind of house her clients will like. She'll usually show it to them first. And then she'll drive them around town for the rest of the day, or maybe the rest of the week, and eventually they'll pick that first house after all. It happened just the other day, said Ramsey, with an out-of-town client she picked up at 8:15 in the morning and dropped back at his hotel 12 hours and 117 miles later.
Intuition and patience — those are the hallmarks of a good Realtor, she says. They also happen to be traits, she believes, that women Realtors tend to have.
Oh, she knows some excellent Realtors who are men. "But men don't have that intuition that women do about what people want. And they don't have the patience women do."
Here's what she means by patience: "You have to stand there while (your clients) measure each room. And even though it's July, they'll say, 'This room isn't big enough for the Christmas tree.' You just have to baby them along. But men just want to get to the next house."
A good Realtor, says Ramsey, will take her clients to lunch. And not just at some fast-food drive-through. A good Realtor will know what to do when the wife in the front seat and the husband in the back seat can't agree on bungalow or Tudor. A good Realtor, she says, will get to know what her clients want because she will have talked to them about their lives.
"She's a mother hen," says a former client. Just a few days before retiring, in fact, Ramsey spent part of the day escorting a new-in-town client to the hospital for tests.
Ramsey and five of her colleagues — Georgia Ball, Jodie Bennion, Barbara Carrier, Sue Christensen and Norine Foote — started their own real estate firm, the Ramsey Group, in 1984.
In her 36 years in real estate, Ramsey has seen booms and busts, 17 percent interest rates, inflation, recession and a clientele that has become increasingly impatient.
Although she was one of the last Realtors to get a phone in her car, like all Realtors she has become a victim of accessibility. "They'll call me on their mobile from a house they've seen advertised and say, 'Can you come over here right now, Rhoda? I'm sitting in the driveway.' "
Increasingly, too, her clients have become two-income families. Often, now, a woman executive will move to Salt Lake accompanied by what is known in the business as a "trailing spouse." And 50 percent of her clients these days are in the market to buy or sell a house because they've been involved in a divorce.
"It's a tough business," says Ramsey. "If you like order and organization in your life, don't go into it."
The Ramsey Group's 22 Realtors, including daughter-in-law Carma Ramsey, will go on without her. As for Rhoda herself, she says she's looking forward to "sitting home and being bored." But then she rattles off her plans: classes at the U., coordinator of Olympic planning for the Rotary Club, a seat on the board of KUED-TV, eight grandchildren to play with, travels with her husband, Uppy.
"We went to Times Square for New Year's Eve," says Ramsey. "That's when I put everything into perspective. I looked at that big, big city and thought: 'I still have a lot to do. And it's not real estate.' "