This and what Hyno-Toad said; now this was over 30 years ago but I can still remember they were all white stucco or masonry rectangular plain jane ranchers, on 1/4 acre lots, block after block after block for miles. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the homes, but it smelled of a Levittown but with no nearby steel plant. One of there more vivid memories of my pre-pube years so it must have been bad.
I always assumed it was swampland, but the ghost town subdivision developments sound like a better fit.
Slightly adjacent to the topic, but where exactly do the leads come from in that kind of business? What process does a company use to gather a list of potential marks and what info would make the GGGR leads better than the crappy ones? I imagine once somebody gets on one of those lists the information passes between the various sales businesses, but how does someone get on the list in the first place?
Perhaps magazine subscriptions, surveys and “You might win!” contests.
Age and income (which can be approximated by zip code) would be major differences.
I think we’re left to guess where the movie leads were supposed to have come from. In the real world, at the time of the movie, the best leads would have come from lists of investors in previous deals. You might guess that people would learn from their previous losses but in many cases, you’d be wrong. I once worked for a broker-dealer that sold interests in strip malls and other commercial properties. Their biggest source of clients was lists of people who had lost massive amounts of money in earlier real estate deals. They got the lists because they had been brokers at another firm that sold those earlier investors their money-losing investments. What was their new pitch to get those same people to invest in a new deal? All those people had large carry-forward passive losses; after tax code changes in the 1980s, passive losses could be written off only in very small amounts every year against ordinary income. Many of the investors wouldn’t live long enough to write off all their passive losses. The company I worked for told them that the solution was to generate lots of new passive income…from new real estate investments. This was a very effective sales pitch.
The guy whom Shelley calls on at his house says, “My wife filled in a form, and we’ve been plagued for the last year!”
The leads are old. They’re cold. They’re dead. They’re toilet paper. Mitch and Murray got those leads out of the phone book.
They are engaging in intentional deceit to obtain money, of course they are immoral. They are damn near criminals.
A couple of them were actual criminals.