But you still need to activate your account.
You here to see my father?” Bill Lawlor asked recently when a visitor rang the bell at the front door of his Washington Street home in Brewer.
Sensing confusion on the visitor’s part, the small 81-year-old man decided not to wait too long for an answer. Wearing jeans, slippers, and a light sweater, Lawlor broke into a big, toothy grin, swung the glass-panel door open and motioned the visitor inside.
Lawlor may have retired recently from his day job as a local real estate broker, but he clearly hasn’t given up his self-confessed hobby of joking around. It’s his sense of humor, he said, that has helped him get through life – including his 52 years in the real estate business.
“People are too serious,” he said. “[My retirement] should have been a lot earlier.”
Lawlor, who on Jan. 1 retired as a broker with ERA Dawson-Bradford in Bangor, got started as a real estate agent in 1954, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court banned racial segregation in public schools and Dr. Jonas Salk began administering his polio vaccine to American schoolchildren.
Lawlor, a spry man who can still jog across a room to answer a ringing telephone, has seen a lot in his life, and not just increased property values. He has witnessed a deliberate explosion in Nazi-held Germany that killed dozens of his fellow Army soldiers in World War II. He spent a month in a local hospital in the early 1970s so he could stop drinking. And, a few years after that, his first wife and the mother of his six grown children died from leukemia.
But none of this stops him from threatening to kick his guests out of his house if they are not enthusiastic enough about the food he repeatedly offers them.
“Out!” he hollers, standing in his kitchen and pointing toward the door, barely suppressing a chuckle at his mock indignation.
In between the ribbing and self-deprecating comments, however, Lawlor reveals a serious side – or serious enough, anyway – that helps show how he lasted more than five decades selling property in eastern Maine.
He cannot estimate how many houses he sold over the years. Once he may have been able to close on 50 properties in a year, he said, but not recently. His pace has slowed down, and as he got older he found himself competing with younger agents for younger clients.
“There are no older men buying,” Lawlor said.
He worked for half a dozen or so agencies during his career, including his own, Great Northern Realty Co., before he sold it to another local businessman in 1974. He once sold three houses on one day and another time sold two houses on Christmas Day.
In the mid-1980s, he helped sell 12 miles of shorefront property on West Grand Lake, near Grand Lake Stream, to a developer for $1.5 million.
“That was the best of the best,” he said of the deals he helped broker. “If that property were for sale today, you’d probably be talking $100 million. Man alive, [that developer] made a fortune.”
Much about the real estate business has changed since 1954, Lawlor said. Back then an agent would have made a 4 percent commission, which is a couple of percentage points less than what most agents charge now. For selling a house worth $10,000, which was a typical price at the time, an agent would take home $400. If another agent was involved in the deal, that $400 would have been split evenly between them, he said.
And the agents back then were always men. He estimated that 35 men worked as agents for the seven or so real estate companies that existed in Bangor in the 1950s. Now 65 percent of agents working nationwide are women, he said.
Homeowners used to defer to agents more, according to Lawlor. More often than not, when approached by a client Lawlor would make recommendations on what could be done to make a house more likely to sell, such as painting a room or fixing up a yard. The homeowner would accept advice from Lawlor, or whichever agent he or she had hired, on what the listing price for the property ought to be.
Nowadays, the seller is more assertive about how the house should be sold, he said.
“I want $189,000!” Lawlor said, mimicking what a homeowner might say when first approaching an agent. “We let the owners become the appraisers.”
The prices, too, have reached heights he never expected. He used to own a 264-acre farm in Newburgh, for which he paid $20,000, he said. He estimates the current owners could sell it for between $3 million and $4 million.
In his hometown of Southwest Harbor, a shorefront field his grandmother used to own sold in 1958 for $1,000, Lawlor said.
“Two years ago they put it up for sale for $1.1 million,” he said. “You couldn’t give that land away in 1950. I’m astounded that the values are so high [in eastern Maine] while the economy is so low.”
Early in his career, Lawlor had big dreams of such financial success. The name of his former realty business, Great Northern Realty, indicates how lofty his goals were, he said.
“I was gung-ho. I was running from house to house, from list to list,” Lawlor said. “I had visions of owning the world.”
But he sold the agency in 1974, shortly before checking himself into a local hospital to treat his alcoholism.
“Alcohol got me into a lot of trouble,” Lawlor said candidly, without having been pressed for private details about his personal life.
Lawlor, who served as an Army radio operator in Europe during World War II, has a photo of himself arriving in New York off a troop transport ship after the end of the conflict. In the photo, which ran on the front page of the now-defunct New York Journal American newspaper, he is flashing a big smile as he carries his duffel bag over his shoulder.
But according to Lawlor, the smile masked a depression he felt from having witnessed death and destruction during the war.
The worst of it happened one morning in the winter of 1994-1945 when his battalion, the Army’s 166th Combat Engineers, had been traveling in Germany for three or four days and came across an abandoned stone building. Finding a bunch of hay mattresses in the basement, the soldiers decided to take a break and catch up on some sleep.
Lawlor said he borrowed a friend’s toothbrush and was walking about a hundred yards away, on his way to brush his teeth, when a time bomb set by the Nazis blew the building up around midday, burying several dozen members of Lawlor’s unit under a pile of collapsing rubble.
“I lost 64 of my buddies that day,” he said. When he got home from the war, he said, he realized civilians “don’t know what death is.”
After the war he went to the University of Maine, where he graduated in 1951 with a degree in business administration. His lingering depression fed his alcoholism, however, which he said hampered his career and got him into some sticky situations. He said he has always been small in stature, but that didn’t stop him from challenging larger men to fights when he had been drinking.
“And then I’d fall over,” he said, breaking into a laugh.
After his hospital stay he never owned his own agency again, but he picked up a serious avocation. For 15 years, while continuing to sell real estate, he worked on the side as a facilitator for his fellow recovering alcoholics at Acadia Hospital.
Despite his longevity as a real estate agent, he said, he got more satisfaction out of helping others with drinking problems. He said a man he once dealt with as a facilitator told him he had saved his life.
“That was better than selling 25 houses,” he said. “If I could do it over again I’d be a facilitator [full-time].”
It has been only three weeks since he officially retired, but much of what he misses about the local real estate business vanished long before then, according to Lawlor.
“There was a lot of faith in one another. The camaraderie was wonderful,” he said. “Now I feel like I’m in a strange city. It’s unfriendly. I’m talking about the world.”
But he seems determined not to let it affect his attitude.
“Good thing I have a good sense of humor,” he said.
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