Saying Goodbye

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Today, I went to a memorial Mass and Irish wake for a dear old friend and colleague, William Thomas Cuddy. He was sort of a Washington real estate legend, and a wonderful charachter. He was almost 80, unless his friends fibbed about his age to the Washington Post. While he was slowing down a bit, he looked quite spry when I saw him a few weeks ago.

Bill was one of the founding agents of my old firm, Pardoe Real Estate, and in that role, he influenced a lot of Washington area real estate professionals who, at one time or another, worked at Pardoe, and later Coldwell Banker. He believed our goal should be, not to be the biggest firm in the area, but to provide truly amazing service to our clients. The emphasis, he felt, should not be on the number of homes you sold, but on how well you did your job.

Today, as we remembered Bill, there were younger agents who shared their experiences of Bill coaching them on how to dress for success in real estate. Good ties. No wash and wear shirts – basically, nothing synthetic about the way you dressed or did business.

Bill is on Page 199 of my book, The Irreverent Guide to Real Estate. He’s the favorite colleague who helped me write an ad for a down town wreck that I listed, and he came up with the heading “Abominable Condition”. That ad attracted dozens of incredulous buyers to my Open House, one of whom bought it.

Speaking of writing, I got to know Bill well back in the 1990’s, when we took a writing seminar together. His good friend, Tom Bryan, found several of his unpublished short stories when he went through Bill’s house. Tom also told me that there was a copy of The Irreverent Guide on Bill’s night table. I’d given it to him a few weeks ago.

Once, some of my clients walked into one of Bill’s Sunday Open Houses, and later told me about meeting this wonderful agent named Bill Cuddly. For me, that name stuck.

And I really hope that he got as far as page 199 in my book!

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