[pullquote cite=” – by Geri Weitzman” align=”right”]Sometimes you just have to create what you want to be a part of![/pullquote]
It was early spring of 2007. There were tremors in the housing markets of California, but no one here worried much about it. Joni and I lived through the February 9, 1971 San Fernando earthquake in Southern California but we never expected anything like that when we moved to Oregon. California is home to earthquakes, even in their housing industry. Their prices routinely grow sky-high, and then get shaken back down to the ground. We’ve learned to ignore it as an inevitable event. Little did we know, within 4 months of Bella Casa’s inception the mother of all quakes would shake the nation’s housing industry.
So much for foresight and good judgment! But if we lacked understanding about the size of the sub-prime quake, we did not lack vision and direction for what we knew would be the brokerage of the future. The colonial era of brokerages was past, and the new era was to be built upon a new model, one we call a professional cooperative.