Who Said San Francisco Was Better Than Heaven?

For your amusement – nine real estate / San Francisco quotables and who said them.

1. “There’s no place like home”

Origin debatable. Number 23 in the top 100 American movie quotations, this phrase was invoked by Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz. The character says something almost identical in the Frank Baum novel of 1900, but it was also the last line in the 1822 song Home! Sweet Home! Regardless of its source, it’s true – possibly because it’s vague enough to cover any unique home experience.

2. “The way you live in a place and the way you sell are two entirely different things.”

Cynthia Cummins. I remind sellers of this, as they contemplate purging possessions, moving out before marketing, or paying for staging. In a sophisticated market like San Francisco, selling a house is about 3 parts theater to 1 part realism.

3. “Home is where one starts from.”

T. S. Eliot. A great first line from Four Quartets “East Coker,” a poem you might want to read sometime. Eliot started in St. Louis, Missouri and suffered from a congenital double inguinal hernia as a child. This meant he didn’t get to play with other children and spent a lot of time alone. Hence, he became interested in – you guessed it – literature!

4. “If It sounds / looks / seems too good to be true, it IS too good to be true.”

Cynthia Cummins. Another of my favorite sayings. That condo priced for $500,000 less than everything else you’ve seen looks wonderful in photos. What doesn’t meet the eye is the view (+ rumble + sound + soot) of Highway 101 or the current litigation between the owners of the 2 units in the building over the pentroom that the upstairs neighbor added without permit while the downstairs owner was on sabbatical in London for a year. That’s just one example.

5. “The fellow who owns his own home is always just coming out of a hardware store.”

Kin Hubbard. The humorist’s humorist, who also said, “The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.” The hardware-store quote is self-explanatory.

6. “Buyers don’t buy in a buyer’s market.”

Cynthia Cummins. The “right moment” always seems to be in the past. This is a phenomenon buyers inevitably experience if they wait for the market to reach the bottom.

7. “Home is the nicest word there is.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her “Little House” books notwithstanding, Wilder endured plenty of “not nice” hardships growing up on the prairie, including near starvation, poverty, violence and life-threatening winter weather.

8. “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

Not Mark Twain. This favorite San Francisco aphorism is usually misattributed to Twain. He did say, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.” But nobody knows where that famous SF summer quote originated.

9. “One day if I do go to heaven...I'll look around and say, 'It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco.’”

These words were written by the “voice and conscience” of San Francisco – Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, who wrote for the paper for 60 years and died in 1997. Per Wikipedia, a rival columnist wrote that the secret to of Caen’s success was “his outstanding ability to take a wisp of fog, a chance phrase overheard in an elevator, a happy child on a cable car, a deb in a tizzy over a social reversal, a family in distress and give each circumstance the magic touch that makes a reader an understanding eyewitness of the day's happenings.” San Francisco could use some of his humor and love, after the beating our fair city has taken recently in national media. If only!