No Magic, Just Six Decades of Persistence - 11/22/2008
Originally printed Nov. 21, 2008, by Dan Voelpel, Reprinted with permission from The News Tribune
On a wall just outside his old office door in Lakewood, Harold Allen Jr. points to a black-and-white photograph of his father and Knute Rockne, the legendary football coach from the University of Notre Dame.
Harold Allen Sr., an automobile dealer in downtown Tacoma, sold the Rockne, introduced in 1932 as a rock-solid, special edition of the Studebaker Corp.
Rockne died in a plane crash in March 1931 – not long after posing for that photograph. Sales of his signature automobile tanked in part because consumers reportedly feared a jinx. Harold Sr. went broke as a car dealer during the Great Depression.
But Rockne’s inspirational words lived on in the life of Harold Sr. and his son.
“The best thing I ever learned in life was that things have to be worked for,” Rockne once said. “A lot of people seem to think there is some sort of magic in making a winning football team. There isn’t, but there’s plenty of work.”
If you ask Harold Allen Jr., a college dropout, how he lasted more than 60 years as a licensed agent in the real estate business in Tacoma, Auburn, Lakewood and Puyallup, you get a Rockne-esque philosophy.
“Persistence,” Allen said this week. “When I started, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Here was a young kid with a crew cut ringing doorbells saying, “Can I sell your house? Please?’
“Being successful in sales doesn’t mean being aggressive. It means working hard and not giving up.”
Now, however, Allen has decided to hang up his Realtor license for good at age 81. He already had turned over Allen Realtors – the independent brokerage founded by his father in 1940 – to his son-in-law, Mike Larson, in 2000.
Maybe 60 years doesn’t sound like a long time. Well, the National Association of Realtors reports that just 2 percent of its members have 40 years of service. And at this year’s centennial celebration, the association honored Texan Ebby Halliday, its longest-tenured member at 63 years.
Tonight the Tacoma-Pierce County Association of Realtors will honor Allen with a distinguished life service award during its annual banquet at the Tacoma Yacht Club.
He deserves it. Among the framed honors on the walls of his office? The check, drawn on a Puget Sound National Bank account, that Allen received as payment for serving as president of the local Realtors in 1954. He served as president again in 1987.
At the beginning of his real estate career, however, Allen didn’t know for sure whether he would last. He’d spent two years in the Navy. His father died. His mother tried to keep the real estate business going but didn’t have any expertise. Neither did Allen, but he decided to drop out of Stanford University to come back to Tacoma and give real estate a try.
He turned 21 and took his broker’s exam in December 1947. He got his license in January 1948.
Not long afterward, he showed a couple from Texas into a home in Puyallup. When Allen walked into the basement, he found himself standing in 6 inches of water.
“You want to buy this house? Why?”
“Oh, we’re from Texas,” the woman replied. “We like a challenge.”
That seven thousand dollar sale was Allen’s first.
He had more big deals to make. Allen helped put together the consortium of investors – with names such as Weyerhaeuser, Clapp and Meadowcroft – who bought 1,000 acres referred to as “The Goose” from the Hewitt family.
Allen’s team turned it into Lakewood’s Oakbrook golf course surrounded by a planned residential neighborhood.
From 1948 to 2008, Allen has experienced more boom-and-bust cycles in the real estate business than most anyone alive. He got into real estate during the post-World War II boom, and leaves it now in perhaps its worst condition since.
And he has some perspective to share.
In Central California, where he lives part time now, the classified section of his newspaper one day featured three pages of foreclosures, each getting four lines of type.
“We’re not that bad, and we’re not going to be – even though the media wants us to believe we’re going to hell in a handbasket,” Allen said.
“Property is selling if it’s realistic (in price). If it’s not realistic, it’s not going to sell. Buyers in this market will buy when they can buy with confidence. They’re not going to buy unless they’re confident in the future.”