PL

What makes the world go round?

Editorial
When she was young she sold strawberries from a family plantation with her parents. She remembers that as soon as a queue was formed, she put up the price, annoying her dad in the process. Over 20 years had passed since then, when the anecdote was recently related to me by my friend, who became a saleswoman in her adult life. Priceless memories. Oh really? Apparently everything can be bought. It is only a matter of the price.

This made me think of Indecent Proposal, an excellent film released in 1993. The movie is set in our business: she works in a real estate agency (Demi Moore) and he is an architect (Woody Harrelson). They take on a loan for the construction of a house, but then the market crashes, they lose their jobs, and they are unable to pay back the loan. They go to a casino in Las Vegas and then... well, fortune is fickle and it turns out that you can also commoditise your feelings. However, is everything really for sale? It has to be admitted that all our lives revolve around buying and selling. My three-year-old son intuitively knows all about this, as demonstrated when he, untutored by anybody in the art, consciously enters into negotiations of his own – for example, over treats. In our line of work we sell our ideas – and if you work in a development company, you would also sell apartments, retail units, office space or even entire buildings. Perhaps this is also the reason why our March issue revolves around purchase and sales transactions, including the growth in the trade for receivables secured by mortgages between banks and debt collection companies (‘Bad Debt... Good Business’), the search for potential property buyers for Polish Post Office properties (‘Posting a Profit’), affluent individuals’ interest in real estate (‘After the First Million – a Property Magnate?’), as well as a discussion about the headline and effective rent disparity between warehouse developers and investors (‘Hitting the Headlines’).

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