COLUMN ONE : Surviving the Home Sale Slump : Sales are about 25% below last year and prices continue to fall. But one real estate agent manages to find a silver lining.

The median strip along San Vicente Boulevard is not yet populated by lean and hungry real estate agents holding those imploring signs that say “will work for food,” or maybe car payments. Shops do not yet carry sympathy cards offering condolences on the loss of your equity.

Even absent those omens, the real estate market could be better, could be at least ambulatory. Was it only 18 months ago that buyers were still the supplicants, and no price was too high? If it had a roof and a parcel number, it had a buyer.

Now it is sellers who are pleading: Own this free Geo Storm, take this free Mediterranean cruise, just please, buy this house. Homes that once sold in days sit unbought for trimesters, prices waft still downward. Throughout the region, the volume of sales has dropped, running about 25% below the pace of last year.

Agents will say that things are slow ; that doesn’t mean they will say things are bad . Bad is not in the public glossary of an eternally sanguine business that will one day clamber out of the rubble of a 9.3 earthquake and assure survivors that now is a great time to buy, that prices are low and there won’t be another quake for 150 years.

So, how slow is it? So slow that when Terri and Steve Albert’s $579,000 Silver Lake house (3 bdrm, 2 1/2 ba, fplc, vus) was advertised by typographical error at $479,000, it brought not one inquiry.

The Alberts and their real estate agent salvaged a bemused laugh from that little horror. The Alberts’ agent is Patrick Lynn. He is 46, a genial man with a cavalier’s fringe of salt-and-pepper curls at the nape of his neck and a fondness for fanciful silk ties. He has sold real estate in Los Feliz and Silver Lake for 13 years, and he is very, very good at it.

To spend a work week with Lynn, when it’s as bad as it’s been in a decade, is to come to an understanding of just what “crisis” means in this spoiled and sated land. This is not 1929; it approaches doom only through the glittering lens of the boom years, when recent memory--as shallow and illusory as a frame of movie film--led us to believe that equity, like the universe, would go on expanding forever.

For Lynn and his colleagues, it is a test of resilience--how a business that sells brick and mortar built on the more perishable foundation of optimism must plump and shape public expectations to match new truths. Lynn’s comforting mantra is: “People with a lot of equity are not taking a loss. They’re just taking less of a profit.”

His drill in this late October week varied hardly at all from the hot times, save for the dollars and a few subtle nuances. From Monday morning to dusk Saturday, Lynn would drive several hundred miles, make half a hundred phone calls (before, he would be answering that many), chase down the maddening minutiae of finance, dredge through drifts of documents, persuade homeowners to hack tens of thousands off asking prices--soothe, advise, cajole.

And yet, for all his labors, for all his assurances that “it’s a good time for buyers to be out there,” in that week not one deal closed on one house. But soon. For he is hopeful, perpetually hopeful.

MONDAY

At his desk on the second floor, Lynn pages through the tissue-weight leaves of the multiple-listing book, the weekly guide to what is for sale. So much sits unbought that the book recently grew to two volumes and jams 12 properties on pages that once fit nine. “Recently reduced” shows up more and more on these pages. Lynn, who knows his part of town virtually house by house, sometimes comes across a place he once sold, and lets loose a half-shriek at an L.A. bargain: “335? Reduced to 335? God almighty. In Los Feliz, 335.”

The commandments of economics say lower prices ought to mean higher sales. So why haven’t they? In the early ‘80s, high interest rates unsettled buyers. Today it is a sullen economy, blue-chip layoffs, the cost of going to war and the cost of not going to war. Buyers sit on their checkbooks, warily. Sellers sit in their unsold houses, bitterly.

Lynn’s standard warning to new clients is that they will probably want too much money, and even if they don’t it may take six or eight months to sell. “‘You’re going to hate me because it’s not going to sell fast,” he will tell them. “You’re going to think I’m terrible and bad, and I’d rather not take the listing.”’

How they react to this caution helps decide whether he’ll take them on: “If they’re nice people and I can deal with them, I think, ‘Oh, maybe there’s a chance I can get them to come down.’ If they’re buttheads as well as being unrealistic, I just walk; I don’t even want to deal with it--an unrealistic price and nasty sellers on top of it.”

On the phone this day is a woman to whom Lynn sold a house about five years ago, for about $400,000. She must sell it now, and in the six months it has been on the market, the price has dropped from $789,000 to $739,000.

She: I heard there were people back (to look at it) for the fourth time.

Lynn: Don’t get too excited. I just talked to them. What happened was, they had a pool company up. The estimate on what they had to do for a pool is higher than what they could afford. . . . It’s still in the picture but not a high priority.

She: Yeah.

Lynn: What you’re looking at is not unusual in today’s market. . . . People will look at something three, four, five times and nothing happens. . . .

She: Do you have any idea if there’s a price this house could be lowered to where it’d sell like that ?

Lynn: My best guess is if you brought it down to 709, 719, looking at a sale of 700, maybe having to go to 695.

A moment of annoyed silence. The lower the price, the less her half of proceeds she must split with an ex-husband.

Lynn: What you’re going to find is that even though you might be selling a little lower, you also will be able to purchase lower as well.

TUESDAY

Lynn’s professional life is bounded by pages 34 and 35 in the Thomas Bros. mapbook. He is bent over them now, seeking comparable sales to price a house he is selling. Two desks away, real estate agent Muriel Jaffe boxes up a Halloween package for her daughter at Harvard. She is sending rubber animal noses--a dog, an alligator--and she shows them off as she packs them away. “Oh, the shark!” cries agent Derek Margo. “Put that one on--that’s the real estate one!”

They all giggle, but it is not a cheery thought, this public image as the carnivore who hunts alone.

Ira L. Sanders manages this Fred Sands office. He has worked in companies so cutthroat that agents hid their files when a colleague walked by. He does not want that ambience here. Meager as sales are, among his 47 agents “morale is up. They’d be much happier if they were making a lot of money. You’re much happier in this slow market when you walk into the sales room and see your name on the sales board. Now you’re walking in saying”--and here he bares a smile through clenched teeth--”’congratulations, I’m so glad you made a sale.’ And you’re jealous. And I can understand that. What we try to point out is it will turn around.”

As it became apparent this was no mere fiscal blip, Sanders dropped three agents. “They were not making the money, they were looking for someone to blame besides themselves.”

Downstairs, Sanders summons his weekly sales meeting, part bulletin board, part revival. “The one thing you’ve got to do in this market,” he is saying, “is keep a sense of humor.” He reads a New York Times story about a do-it-yourself home sellers’ expo.

“I think what this points to (is) we’re not taking seriously how some of these homeowners have a desperate need to sell, a desperate need, and it’s not funny. The people you can kind of smile at are those who are looking to make a quick buck, who aren’t happy with a 300% profit, they want 400%.”

He scans the room, the desks with trophies of green glass declaring the recipient to be a member of the multimillion-dollar sales club. “Forget about calling buyers today; call your sellers.”

That afternoon, Lynn’s phone rings--a seller who calls regularly, and unhappily.

Seller: Hi. I just called to bitch.

Lynn: We’ll get it sold in time for you to make the right purchase. . . .

Seller: God, were you an optimist as a kid?

Lynn: (with a burbling laugh) Probably!

WEDNESDAY

Line by line, through 18 items in an inspection report on a Los Feliz house about to close escrow, Lynn and another real estate agent negotiate by phone. The earthquake straps on the water heater. The wobbly toilet.

Lynn has had it happen before, an argument over a $500 repair blowing a $500,000 sale. He has on occasion thrown in the difference from his commission, just to shut everyone up and close the deal. This seller insists that the buyer read his answers to this inspection. Lynn thinks it unwise; now is not a time to antagonize buyers with testy remarks like this, about some stuck windows: they have been “painted shut since the beginning of time. Only Charlton Heston could part them.”

By 3:30, Lynn is planting the toe of one handsome cowboy boot on the crossbars of steel open-house signs. He drives one into a bed of daisies, another into a mound of ivy. From 4 to 6 p.m.--4 to 5:30 if no one shows up--he’ll try a “twilight open.”

“We did it in the early 1980s when the market was slow. We saw a big difference in sales over that.” He carries flyers through the marbled entry to the tall living room with its green carpets and pale pink walls, reduced from 469 to 449. “This is gonna be real slow, I have a feeling.”

Yet within 20 minutes, two young men in T-shirts are looking timidly in the door, like men shopping for tube socks who have wandered into Bijan. As they peek into each room, Lynn deals out tidbits. “Per square foot this is the best deal on the market. There’s still a lot that can be done. The colors may not be to everyone’s individual taste,” he adds delicately.

“I kind of like it,” says the taller young man. “We came to look at a place on Angus and saw this. We weren’t looking this high, more like 250.”

“Well, wait till you hear the good news!” says Lynn. “There’s a whole floor upstairs that rents for $955. That’s like $100,000 off the price, with that income.”

“It’s very nice,” the taller young man says. “I really think we were looking for something a little less.”

“Well, how much are you able to put down? Because they’re willing to carry some paper . . . someone looking at the 300s could actually afford this because of the income.”

Before Lynn was a real estate agent, he was a banker, and part of his strength these days is his sure grasp of “creative financing” to make the improbable affordable. After the bank, he and his business partner bought their own real estate company. They sold it five years ago and crossed the street to Fred Sands. During the breakneck year of 1989, the two of them sold $25 million worth of property. Lynn planned to ease off in 1990 to tend his own investments, and the poor market has made that considerably easier.

“We thought it was a typical slowing down. It didn’t slow down. It came to a grinding, screeching halt.” He calculates they have done about $15 million in sales this year, still a handsome sum for a shakeout that has frog-marched some real estate agents out of the business and left others surviving from escrow to escrow.

Farewell to the fat years when rich commissions on absurd prices all but fell into bank accounts, to dabblers who “did” real estate the way everyone “does” a screenplay. Vale , too, to some earnest, honest ones who, at 30- or 40-something, find themselves living once again with mom and dad.

Lynn went to college, studied psychology. Before that, he came off Chicago’s South Side. There were afternoons when he walked home from school to find the family’s belongings dumped on the sidewalk, evicted. The slum kid now owns a fine house. His Mercedes sedan is the color of butter cream.

His is the voice of the slum kid who made good, very good, and talks a blunt-edged line of social Darwinism: that harder times just demand harder work, that most agents who aren’t cutting it aren’t doing enough, that you have to sell yourself before you can sell a house.

The young men at the pink and aqua house are beginning to move regretfully toward the door.

“Are you working with an agent?” Lynn asks. “Have you gone over finances?”

Yes, they are. Yes, they have. The taller young man casts another longing look around him, and they trail down the marble steps and out the front door.

Lynn sits on a pouffy white couch. If it wasn’t a harvest, it planted a seed. “You do a pitch as far as you go, and you switch gears if there’s resistance. I push in a real subtle way. I was throwing questions at them so they can analyze whether they’re being well served.”

Another hour slips by. This idle, untrafficked quiet is far from the grand days of two years past, an age enshrined in its own wistful lore as “the frenzy.”

Buying a house during the frenzy was like having a baby; it dictated its own schedule, its own terms. “If you saw a house that day for your client, and your client didn’t get there by that day to see it, it’s possible it would not be there by the weekend,” Lynn would recall.

Cars glide past, going home. Some slow, but they do not stop. Before 6 p.m, he shuts the windows, turns off the music.

“I guess twilight showings don’t work any more.”

THURSDAY

This is the part that gets his blood racing: going in cold, selling himself, his style, his savvy. “You have to have a bit of an ego in this business. You have to feel you’re the best, you can handle it no matter what. . . . The money I definitely enjoy, but I also get real jazzed by going after a listing,

doing a presentation and getting it. I go, ‘Yeah! I did it right again and I got it!’ ”

He parks at a house near the Silver Lake reservoir. A kid in a Joe Montana shirt answers the door. Another sits inside eating chestnuts. Their mother steps up. During the pleasantries, Lynn’s eyes take the measure of the place: step-down living room, hardwood floors under a rubble of Mutant Ninja-Nintendo-Mattel toys. “Oh, this is nice! So, what are your plans?”

The family wants to move to a better school district and need an agent to sell this house. Lynn, referred to them by a friend and hoping for his share of half of a 6% commission, wants the listing.

As Lynn walks through, he explains. “What I do is just look at the house, go back and put together a whole proposal, our recommendations, how we advertise, how we market, all of our propaganda. “ They both laugh. “So I’ll just be nosy for a few minutes. We’ve got the living room, dining room--was this a breakfast room at one time?”

In a quarter-hour, he is done. “That’s all I need to see. Now, are evenings better for you?” They are not. What about Saturday? “I could probably do it Saturday afternoon. How would 4 o’clock be?”

Come Saturday he would have a sales presentation ready, and a suggested price--$539,000, disappointingly less than the sellers had hoped, the new math of reality.

FRIDAY

Terri and Steve Albert bought their house in Silver Lake four years ago. Lynn showed it to them on a day when the Santa Anas had raked the basin clean, and it looked like Catalina Island lay at the foot of the back yard.

With a child and a business at home, they now need something more than this house that they bought for about $350,000 and spent thousands improving.

They put it on the market at $579,000. Forty real estate agents have trooped through, quick with superlatives and assurances. None have come back.

“We’re only on the market for a month, but it seems like longer,” Terri Albert says. “I think if we’d sold this house a year ago, we could’ve seen another $100,000 out of it, don’t you?”

“I think it could have broken 6,” Lynn agrees.

Albert’s daughter scampers into the room in a red cape, her palms painted poison green. “You get squeezed either way,” her mother says. “We’ll sacrifice some paper equity in this house for a better deal on the other end.”

It has been hard for her to drive past for sale signs and not look, not fantasize about a new place. Lynn has cautioned them not to and she hasn’t. But matters have changed, and that’s why he is here today.

“Since we’ve talked, new prices have come on the market,” he begins.

Yes. A friend told her about some fabulous estate, reduced from $1.9 to $1.1 million. Maybe it’s a precursor. “Maybe now, places out there in the 7s will be coming down into the 5s.”

“Precisely,” says Lynn. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“You’re going to let me look at something?” She smiles.

Here is his windup: “You’ll be selling soft here, and buying soft there.” And the pitch: “That’s why I mentioned a reduction.” She makes a face. “I’m talking major,” he says. The face gets more intense. “I’m talking 529.”

“Asking, or taking?”

“Asking,” he says.

“When do you think we’ll get people coming in here?”

“Probably when we reduce it.”

Probably.

SATURDAY

Showing around only two serious buyers on a Saturday in 1988 would have been sloth. In 1990, it is a good day’s work. The first of them is a laconic young man house hunting for his girlfriend. The laconic young man is from England. In London, and not even the best parts of London, $250,000 buys a dim, one-bedroom basement flat. It is a mercy, after all these years and all this dinning about Southern California sticker shock, for Lynn to hear this Englishman remark on how much space one gets, for so relatively modest a price.

The first house he sees is one Lynn has had on the market for six months. It has slid, a bump at a time, down the pricing scale from $495,000 to $398,000 and the owners would likely take less. The laconic young man steps through the paneled den, along the hardwood floors, out to the deck. “It’s your good fortune and their misfortune,” Lynn says as he follows in his wake, “to get a house like this for that price. A year ago that money would have gotten you into a cracker box.”

The young Englishman says nothing for a long while. Then, “I think she’d be quite interested in this.”

For this most professional man, it is hard not to allow a look, one that shades pleasure and triumph and a kind of relief, to cross his face.

The silk of the California cocoon is coming unspooled; the fabled, insulated economy begins to look like anywhere else, as vulnerable and as twitchy. The houses here are just houses, after all, not private gold mines.

The frenzy was very good to people in Ira Sanders’ office, from Patrick Lynn to the greenest salesman. Maybe now is the time for some soul searching.

“Maybe,” Sanders was saying one waning afternoon, “more Americans, Southern Californians in particular, ought to start looking at real estate as shelter, and not strictly as investment. There is the investment potential, but good God, you’ve got a nice income tax writeoff, you’ve got a place you want to live in and a set amount you’re paying for quote rent for the next 30 years.”

Isn’t, the tone of his voice asks, isn’t that enough?