Benabou-Rozenblat Drags Ethics Front and Centre in Local Real Estate Wars

Benabou-Rozenblat Drags Ethics Front and Centre in Local Real Estate Wars
Written By Bram Eisenthal (Journalist/Editor)


If you have ever bought or sold a home, chances are you have dealt with Real Estate Agents. As far as I am concerned, from my perspective as a client, they come in two categories: 1/ Smart businesspeople, who understand the market, connect with their clients and want their clients to emerge from the deal eminently satisfied. The agent makes money, but not at the expense of the client and 2/Shrewd, ruthless individuals who con you into buying a house you don’t want or need and often hide the nasty details in order to make the sale at all costs.
I have, unfortunately, tasted both pieces of that pie. When I sold my home in NDG in the early 1990s, I benefitted from the services and talents of a savvy, kindly and energetic veteran agent named Patricia Tustin who is sadly no longer with us. She sold my duplex for what was then a very fair price for me as well as the buyer. We were both very happy. In the late 1990s, when my then-wife and I were searching for a home on Blossom Avenue in Cote St. Luc, we used the founder of a West End agency who, it turned out, was far from honest with us. She recommended an inspector she claimed was a professional when we asked the question, it turned out later that he wasn’t and it cost us about $10,000 two years later to fix a problem he had missed. This agent was in the No. 2 category and I will never use her firm again, nor will I recommend it or her to anyone else. Was it worth lying to us for that dubious distinction and a few bucks, I wonder?

Getting to know her as I have these past few years, Anita Benabou-Rozenblat is definitely a Number One agent, in every conceivable way. She parlayed a successful career selling her own line of clothing on the Home Shopping Channel aired in Canada into the ultimate cold call, emerging from under the stressful veil of her real estate exams and landing on the ground running, starting to sell almost immediately.

I wrote a column about Anita a few years back (Briefly Bram, The Monitor, March 2007) and my initial glowing impressions of her have expanded incrementally with every award she has won, every house she has sold... and there have been many of the latter. In fact, I would challenge anyone to prove they’ve got a better close rate, or a better reputation. And while she is indeed a beautiful, classy woman, in my opinion, this has been accomplished without the need to place sexy billboards all over the city, leading me to believe “those” campaigns are more about body image than they are about brick and mortar.

If you decide to take a little tour around this site, by all means check out Anita’s blog, which gives you an idea of the sense of morals and ethics that guide her every waking moment... only her husband, I’m sorry to say, can tell us what guides her while she’s asleep. “Choose your agent based on honesty, ethics, experience, competence and marketing,” Anita advises prospective clients, stressing that any agent who knocks another is a sign of an unconfident agent who is concerned they themselves do not have the goods. Maliciousness is also not a sound human trait, as we all know, and anyone practising it should be avoided like the Plague. Remember, they burned witches in Salem for guile and deceit... yet here, in this time and place, some are still allowed to work in Real Estate.

Unfortunately, that green-eyed spectre named Envy isn’t limited to those desiring snazzier cars and Hope-like diamonds. It’s quite abundant in the workplace, as well. When it comes to Benabou-Rozenblat’s success-studded resume, it’s no wonder some of her peers are envious of her.

From the age of 17 on, she worked at a hair salon as a shampoo girl, then studied evenings to become a much-touted dental assistant (how many people can claim they cleaned the teeth of musicians Hall & Oates, Tina Turner & Rod Stewart), worked as an actress in many films and, at age 22, garnered the opportunity to work with the late Douglas “Coco” Leopold, the gateway to her career as a fashion designer. So, few who know her well are surprised that Anita is breaking records as a Real Estate agent and has been awarded such industry honours as Double Centurion Producer (2009) and Centurion Producer (2008). Bare in mind she has been working in the industry for a very short time compared to most others.

What IS most wondrous, however, is that she does so by choosing ethics as her guide. Judging from my experiences, that isn’t always the case.
Well done, Anita... you’re one of a kind!