Looking at yourself in the mirror

 

This post is tagged with the tag 'Morality'. The first one with that tag was the one about the mendacious and grasping budget airline and its complaints centre. But that was only a cut-and-thrust multi million pound company. This one is much smaller scale, but I would argue, far far more about morality.

A number of decades ago in a medium sized English town a widow wanted to sell her house as she had newly become a widow, and the house was the biggest asset she had, and could protect her somewhat in her new situation. 

When she went to sell it to downsize, she went to the four or five well-established local estate agents, all well-known and well-respected in this friendly tight-knit community. She contacted some of them, or perhaps all of them to find out about putting the house on the market and how to do it. One of them suggested an asking price in the region of £300,000, which was quite a considerable sum at the time. The next one was a bit more optimistic, maybe £310,000 and I think another slightly low-balled, but there wasn't a real estate fag paper between the amounts, in truth. 

While deciding which agency to go with, using the professional values and local reach and reputation of each agency to decide, and asking friends etc, the widow thought - and she was a perfectly intelligent woman who many years earlier had in fact got a reasonable degree from Cambridge, which I don't think any of the Estate Agents had done - I'll try one of the other agents in that bigger town some miles away. She did, they came round, and said that she should actually put it on the market for about £350,000. So she did, and she got the price in full very easily from one of the first bidders. And of course, a bigger fee for the estate agent because his percentage fee was a percentage of a larger amount.

So what was going on? How had such experienced and respectable local businesses made such a Horlicks of estimating the selling price of a house in the very town in which they lived? Those of a more suspicious nature will know already what happened.  They talked to each other, off the record, about what would be an appropriate price for the property and I suppose whichever one she chose that time, it would over the years ensure that whoever you went to the houses would go on the market at the price that they agreed. 

So why on earth do this? Why put a house on the market at a deliberate discount below what the local market will clearly bear? That lowers your 2% or 4% fee income somewhat and it seems a bit silly. It's practically robbing yourself. 

Well it would be if it weren't for the next bit. The buyer usually turns out to be a local builder or developer who gets the place cheaper and gives something back to the agents in turn. Maybe actual cash. Maybe just favours - you scratch my back I scratch yours. Whichever way it was not to help the widow. 

In fact, they were prepared to deliberately harm a vulnerable person by effectively taking money from someone who really needed it, just so that they could better afford the next skiing holiday. And that is the mirror bit. If you are one of those principals involved, how can you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, knowing what you have deliberately done. 

Maybe you don't have a mirror for this reason. Maybe you find that the details are always blurred by the good wine that you drink. Maybe you think if you admitted the moral depravity of what you were doing, how could your private-school educated children ever respect you. I don't know. I won't ever have to know, because I won't ever be looking in that particular mirror. And I am so grateful for that.

We can, if we squint a bit, or don't look too closely, pretend that we don't see the absolute screamingly obvious nature of The Right Thing to Do and The Wrong Thing to Do. But when you are on your deathbed you might see it.

Now this all happened a long time ago, but I have quite enough information to probably find out the actual names of the principals involved. But it is a long time ago as I say. And they are probably all dead. And I certainly hope they are.