Is There a Spy in Your Office?

Real Estate Tradecraft... "Washington is a city that thrives on secrets but simultaneously abhors them, especially someone else's secrets."

I smiled when I read that quote from Bob Woodward's new book, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat, about his Watergate reporting.

Isn't the same thing true about real estate, especially in a brokerage environment? You love secrets, except when you don't know them!

Information is currency in real estate. Who's selling? Who's buying? Who's relocating? Your fellow office mates are simultaneously colleagues, friends and competitors.

If you see another broker taking a photograph of a building or if you observe a tenant touring vacant space, don't those provide clues to a transaction? Might the building soon be on the market? Might the tenant be planning to move? So to cover your tracks, have you ever taken a devious route to a property?

Deep Throat required Woodward to leave his apartment building through the back door, take a taxi to a point a few blocks from a hotel with taxis after midnight, walk to the hotel, take another taxi and, finally, walk to an underground garage for their rendezvous at two in the morning (pp. 63-65).

OK, that's a little extreme for real estate. But I'll bet that lots of corporate relocations start out as projects with mysterious code names in order to disguise the company and prevent corporate gossip. Secrecy is paramount.

So what are your favorite real estate tradecraft stories? Blast away.

-- Peter Pike