The Comeback
“Come in,” Ray said. “What are you looking for?”
“Work. A regular job,” I said, wary of seeming like an actor.
“Well we don’t have any of those,” he told me. “This is all commission-based.” Ray Kender is a large man with a jolly nose and bulging arms that taper evenly into round, uniform fingers. He wore horn-rimmed bi-focals and spoke in a bassy robotic whir that made it seem like he had just risen from two or three days of deep sleep. Sitting in a small office decorated with brass figurines and ornately carved elephant tusks (“my wife’s Chinese”), Ray explained the merits of a commission-based pay structure: “most people want a paycheck—they’re looking for that $12/hour job. Well, paychecks are fine, but there’s a limit to how much money you can make. With commissions, there’s no limit.”
Ray went on in his genteel Indiana rumble: “Now we do real estate sales, but what this is for is loan modifications. That’s what’s really going crazy now: at this point in time, there are 14 million homes that are upside down. In a year, there will be another 25 million. This is a big, big, mess and it hasn’t even come close to bottoming out.”
As he spoke, Ray began to shuffle a neat array of print-outs on the money to be made in real estate. There was one that said “STOP Real Estate foreclosures dead in their tracks” in red ink. Culling addresses from an online database of default notices, Ray mails these flyers to homeowners on their way to foreclosure, and, should they call back, offers to pursue a reduction on their mortgage loan for anywhere from $2500 to $5000, depending on the value of the house.
“We provide a service, that’s all.” Ray showed me the contract: “The principal is compensating the broker for a service that the principal could obtain free of charge from a housing counselor or directly from the lender.” He was jubilant—“They don’t need us, and we tell them that right up front! But people are lazy.” “No guarantees/Best Effort,” the contract said.
He pointed to a clause that split the work into two phases, with half the payment due at the end of phase one. If his clients are in financial trouble, I asked, how is he sure to get paid at all?
“We take cash. We don’t let nobody write no checks or anything,” Ray said, shaking with a laugh that began at the waist. “They’re not paying their mortgage, so they should have something to pay us. If we go through phase one and they don’t pay, then at that point in time, you did work for nothing.”
Ray slid his papers around like a poker dealer.
“Now what your job is is two things—to recruit, and to, solicit,” he said, pointing at those words in sequence with a ball point pen. He seemed reluctant to finish a sentence until he’d checked that it was already committed to writing on one of his documents.
“Now let’s say the fee is $3500. Phase one is $1750.” Ray showed me a printed table and pointed to the column marked ‘Total Commissions.’ “You’re Level One, so you’ll make $175. But you don’t want to make $175. You’ll starve to death.”
He described the work as “Multi-level marketing—like Mary Kay,” then turned to the computer and pulled up an animated graphic of a pyramid scheme of blinking blue and red bubbles. “You’ve got to find people like you who want to make some extra money in real estate.”
Back to the chart. As you moved through the levels, with 2, then 4, then 8 people below you, you gradually found yourself sitting on top of a “company within a company,” making $6265 a week off of commissions generated by the people below you. “It’s easy to find people,” he said. “Just go to the barbershop—they got a captured market—and say ‘hey, you want to make five, eight hundred a week extra in real estate? Or the carwash—just put up a poster like my ad that says ‘you want to make some extra cash in real estate?’”
Ray’s energy was unbeatable. He had started the company in 2006, only to be diagnosed with cancer weeks later, a spinal tumor “the size of a grape, pushing up on my nerves.” After two surgeries and 18 months’ recovery, Ray is back at it. “I pissed away $50,000 on this in 2006, and now I’m just getting to it,” he said with gusto. “I started on Monday.”
