Duh, they’re selling real estate. But who sells real estate in this manner, and why?
I’ve bought residential property, both to live in and to rent. If it was new construction I went to the builder. If it was pre-owned I engaged an agent of my own and we went to the seller. In no case was a slimy high-pressure salesman involved. In no case did anybody cold-call me.
I’m aware that there are REIT’s, for serious real estate investors. The salesmen in GGR don’t seem to be selling REIT shares.
So again, what are the salesmen selling? Is it unimproved land? Is it lots with new houses? If the latter why wouldn’t they just open up a model home and wait for buyers? Are the buyers expected to rent the houses, or flip them, or just wait for a developer to improve the land, or what?
And who exactly are the “leads”, about whom the salesmen bitch through most of the movie? What would I have to do to become a “lead” for a real estate salesman? (Not that it sounds like an enticing prospect.)
I think the DVD commentary says it’s worthless swamp land in Florida without infrastructure, prettied-up with a grand sounding name (“Glengarry Heights” for example) and sold as “the investment opportunity of a lifetime”.
The leads are names and addresses of likely suckers who might have the cash to spend on such a pipe dream. Marketing people get these names from questionnaires, contests, other businesses etc etc. If on paper you look like you have $10,000 to drop on such an investment, you might become a “lead”.
Weak leads are the people who don’t really have the money or the inclination to be suckered.
Strong leads would be, for example, the elderly with some cash to spare and a surfeit of trust.
For what it’s worth, I know a guy in Australia who, in the 80’s, made an absolute fortune in the “leads” business. Basically he collected masses of information (using any means necessary) about people and their spending habits, collated that information into easily searchable databases and sold the results.
So when Baldwin says “Mitch and Murray paid good money for these leads” we know the leads came from such a similar enterprise.
A.I.D.A.
Attention, Interest, Decision, Action.
Attention: do I have you attention?
Interest: are you interested? I know you are, because it’s fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks.
Decision: have you made your decision for Christ?
And…
Action.
God I love that movie.
“The leads are weak.” The fucking leads are weak? You’re weak. I’ve been in this business fifteen years-
So, when Jack Lemmon sells the insane couple “eight units”, it doesn’t mean eight lots with houses on them . . . it just means, eight pieces of land somewhere?
And to profit, they’d pretty much need somebody to want the land for a subdivision?
I don’t think anyone buys eight house+land packages without at least going out to look at them, so no, probably not. As you say, more likely it’s 8 units (however units is defined) of vacant (swamp) land. I bet they have nice brochures with lots of pretty pictures, together with graphs that show a nice expected ROI.
People buy up vacant property all the time for all sorts of reasons - they expect the land value will rise, they hear developers are looking into the area, they think it’s a safer investment than the stock market in the short/long term, they plan to move there when they retire, etc.
Don’t get too caught up in the specifics. The Glengarry Glen Ross land packages are like Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase - you don’t need to know what’s there, just that whatever it is is important, or in this case, worthless.
I think that’s what confused me. I’m a suburbanite, and I’m used to Shady Acres or Glen Ross Heights being a real subdivision with real houses, or at least lots. Come to think of it, maybe I’d be the perfect sucker for the salesmen.
My grandmother fell for a scam back in the '60s- it was a a ‘planned’ beach retirement community near Biloxi, Mississippi. My father was livid when he found out. I think she paid around $200 for a half-acre lot, “minutes from the beach”, which doesn’t sound like much, but back when she bought it the lot was literally underwater for a good portion of the year and you could buy a farm in the area for $100 an acre, which is probably exactly what the company did (buy a small farm and subdivide it into ‘lots’).
We used to drive by and see it out of curiosity when we were en route to New Orleans even though it’s quite a bit out of the way. My sister owns it now. She pays the taxes which aren’t much and I think the tax assessors value has risen to around $1,000 after about 40 years. She holds onto it hoping that one day with the casinoes and new developments it might conceivably one day increase significantly in value. It’s still outside of any city limits (which was somehow a selling point to my grandmother who lived in Alabama a LONG way from any city limits- not sure what she was looking to get away from) but there is a road that goes within a hundred feet or so of it that you could get an easement access to. It’s not absolutely inconceivable that one day somebody might want it for something (I think my sister once got a letter of interest from somebody offering a few hundred dollars tentative to others who own land around it selling- she declined because she doesn’t need the money and it wasn’t much), but it’s certainly never going to make her rich and meanwhile it’s still marshy (until it’s drained any house would have to be on stilts) “minutes from the beach” means at least 30 minutes from anywhere you can park, plus the Mississippi Sound isn’t exactly like the white sand beaches of the Florida panhandle and Alabama, and anybody from Biloxi who wants something out in the country has lots and lots to choose from before coming to a sunken lot with a view of some other sunken overgrown land around it.
It was probably something like that: legal but with brochures whose wording had probably been gone over by several lawyers to get as close as possible to saying “One day this will skyrocket in value” without actually saying it. My father said the literature they gave my grandmother (which he didn’t see til it was a fait accompli) talked about the worthless land near Orlando that went from being worth $50 per acre to tens of thousands once Disneyworld was created (neglecting to mention that Disney had bought up most of that land for $50 per acre through dummy corps, which was the whole point) and similar places, and of course there were artists sketches of a proposed clubhouse and orange groves and probably an alligator farm and flying car pad or something similar with little bitty artist rendering- no clubhouse orange groves gator farm or flying car possible at this time in what would be a size 2 Calibri font on MS Word.
There were also lots of these for Georgia mountain property a few years back. The property most certainly did exist, and really did have beautiful views; it was neglected to mention that it was on a slope so steep it would cost you a million dollars to level it enough to park a car there and you’d also have to pay for about a mile of road.
Most states have cooling down periods now for things bought during high pressure sales pitches, which is (IIRC) what Jonathan Pryce’s character invokes in GGGR. (They even have them for much smaller purchases like door-to-door magazine sales and solicited charitable donations.) It’s largely because of people like my grandmother who, though not a sweet or trusting person, somehow got slickered by a “Machine Levine” type who convinced her she was buying what would one day be the epicentre of the next Disney World.
Yes, I did, and I answered it with all we know. I don’t remember the flick describing the exact properties being offered; it was the concept, the desperation, the scam and the interaction that was important.
Marketing generates leads, hopefully ranks them by strength (and maybe even nurtures them with a little demand generation activity), then passes them along to sales, who hopefully converts them to customers. Marketing deals with prospects en masse (perhaps with the illusion of personalization), while sales talks to individuals.
Since salesmen don’t have the time, money, or experience to generate their own leads, they live and die by lead quality.
Related question in GGR - what does the word ‘sit’ mean that they use, e.g. You think this is abuse? You can’t take this how can you take the abuse you get on a sit?
