Mark My Words...
Over breakfast, I found myself musing about buttered toast. Some clever Ancient – most likely an Egyptian – discovered that holding bread over a fire made it look different and taste better too. And, that’s about where toast remained for the next seven thousand years or so.
The Romans called their tasty incinerated loaves “tostum’ meaning, “scorched.”
Legend has it that Da Vinci drafted a design for a toaster but didn’t have the sliced bread to make it work, and that the Earl of Sandwich actually enjoyed his meat meals tucked not between two hunks of plain bread but between nicely-burned pieces of…toast.
But, toast remained a specialty until the early 20th century, when electricity started to become widely available and the toaster and the bread slicer combined to give coffee and fried eggs a new breakfast partner.
Interestingly enough, many of the first electric toasters weren’t in kitchens. Many “ultra-modern” homes around 1910 included a toaster in every bedroom! The idea was that people of means could simply rustle up a few pieces of toast without trundling off to the kitchen or ringing for Jeeves to bring them something to spread their marmalade on.
It wasn’t until the 1920’s that a really practical home toaster – with a name we still know today, “Toastmaster” – hit the market. It not only popped the bread up when it was finished, it toasted both sides at once, a previously impossible feat!
Because so many folks peruse the media's real estate pages over breakfast, toast seemed to me to be an appropriate topic. More to the point, toast symbolizes a number of things that are important to the real estate profession today.
One of these is that there’s really nothing new under the sun. Toast today isn’t much different from toast in 5000 B.C. A successful real estate transaction in today’s sophisticated real estate market isn’t much different from a successful real estate transaction in 1980, or 1880 for that matter. Just more complicated.
Another is that excellence persists; gimmicks fade fast. Early toasters turned bread, flipped it, tossed it in the air and ran it through conveyor belts. The design that finally got it right is the same one in use today. When a real estate market is “hot", new salespeople pop up over-night…and disappear just as fast.
On the other hand, I’ve been in this business long enough to have a tremendous record of success. And, like “Toastmaster”, Mark Goldsmith isn’t just a name…it’s a brand, and a guarantee of innovation and quality.
That’s why I’m inviting you to finish breakfast and give me a call today at 310-200-6697, or send me an e-mail. I’ll personally take your property from listing to sale without any of the difficulties that can arise from our complex, fast-paced real estate market.
I’m the best, and these days, if you don’t go with the best, you could be…toast!
Mark Goldsmith
Coldwell Banker
(310) 200-6697
DRE #01031230
