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In Shody Real Estate BusinessDinner's On Them, The Joke's On YouIn this shady corner of the real-estate business, land is not so much bought as sold. The customer’s encounter with the lot salesman has been as carefully rehearsed as a Broadway play. There is an appropriate bit in the salesman's repetoire for every occasion but the one that calls for every trick in his book is the land-sales dinner, a favorite device of many large subdividers. Strangers are invited at random to a free dinner, and two hours later they are sold land that they have never seen and know nothing about.At one AMREP dinner, the sales manager’s opening remarks insistently repeated the key word, like a Pavlo* vian signal:I welcome you now to join our very successful family of property owners, because certainly SUCCESS does breed SUCCESS and there’s absolutely nothing but nothing, that succeeds like SUCCESS. In that sense, I do wish each and every one of you SUCCESS...”This benediction was followed by allegations that Albuquerque, in the case of AMREP’s Rio Rancho Estates, is a city of cosmopolitan virtues: vibrant and modern, and at the same time romantic, old-world, and picturesque “where millions of Americans are pouring in to enjoy longer. . .lives.’’ (Exaggerated and unfounded health claims are not patented by AMREP. At a sales dinner in New York for General Development Corp., guests were told that moving to Florida’s Gulf Coast would add more years to their lives than anything besides giving up cigarettes.)Because of its manifest and unlimited virtures, the narrator goes on. “Albuquerque has multiplied more than seven times in population in the last 35 years, and now stands on the threshhold of its greatest growth, with more people expected in the next ten years than in any similar period before.Over and over, in words and pictures, AMREP proclaims that Albuquerque is “bursting at the seams.” But, according to AMREP, this problem plays right into the pockets of profit-minded Rio Rancho landowners —The African DroughtNAIROBI - (LENS) -Africa’s great drought is spreading. Having dried up a belt just south of the Sahara from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east, the drought and its shadow, famine. are intensifying andInevitably, the children are the first to suffer. Rain should normally come to central Kenya in April but. if the pattern of the past few years is repeated, nothing can be expected until October. By then the drought's victims inthe only available living space lies to the northwest, across the Rio Grande, where Rio Rancho Estates ostensibly monopolizes the landscape. In a brochure, a big red GROWTH arrow thrusts from the epicenter of an expanding Albuquerque toward the heart of Rio Rancho like a Panzer division blitzing through Belgium.Worsens By The Day1960-1970, they report, the net in-migration to Bernalillo County — Albuquerque’s metropolitan area — was “less than 0.05 per cent. For neighboring Sandoval County, where Rio Rancho has been operating for a decade,The effect of such growth on land values at Rio Rancho is repeatedly spelled out. one version testifies that it is not unusual for land values to jump 200 to 300 per cent in a few short years.This kind of appreciation in land values is inevitable at Rio Rancho, especially because “within a year we’ll be completely sold out, a sales woman warns her dinner companion. “Within a year, you 11 have to go to the property owners to buy property, and pay five times the price for it. That’s minimum. It goes up 12 per cent at a shot, 15 per cent. Constantly going up and the reason people buy it here and now is that they’re freezing it at today's price...”But even as the potential plutocrat is contemplating getting rich on his Rio Rancho investment, he is also being invited to move to Rio Rancho Estates to exchange the pollution, crowding and crime of his urban prison for a life of relaxed comfort among the wonders of nature and good neighbors. Rio Rancho is no soulless, sprawling suburb, the sales manager proclaims, but a brand new city that we’re building from scratch... a real scion tifically planned com-the figures are even less en-couraging: more people moved out than moved in.Even if the city should, by some miraculous population spurt, manage to jump its present limits, there is no reason to believe that it must head for Rio Rancho. For example, just south of Rio Rancho — and closer to downtown — is Horizon Cor-po ration’s 12,000-acre Paradise Hills, adjoined by the Falls Land and Development Company’s Volcano Cliffs. And near Belen, south of Albuquerque, Horizon has another 155,000 acres or so in several subdivisions.So the investment value of all those Rio Rancho lots sold to customers at land-sales dinners may be, for all practical purposes, negligible. Worse yet, with some exceptions, Rio Rancho lots cannot be resold at even the purchase price, nor is there much prospect of a market for .them. In fact, while AMREP’s sales people have been proclaiming that the prices they have been quoting represent fair market value, the corporation has been whispering the truth in the pages of the legally required offering statement that most lot buyers evidently either do not read or fail to understand:. .Lots may also be purchased for speculative purposes, but suchit for, is what some city bumpkin who wouldn’t know an acre from an anthill is willing to pay for it. And ironically, the higher the price, the more willing the customers.A former executive of Horizon, one of AMREP’s competitors, tells of a new Albuquerque subdivision:“Started at $600 a lot -couldn’t sell it. Sixty days later, we raised the price to $800, then sixty days after that we raised it to $1,000 a lot. Then our pitch was really simple: ‘Look, had you bought it four months ago you d have made four hundred bucks.’ And then the sales really began to pick up.”MODEL RS-30Easy Cooking At A
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Harlan Daily Enterprise
Harlan, Kentucky, US
Fri, Apr 05, 1974
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USA 06 Jun 2025
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