Do The Right Thing

Builders know better than anyone that there are no shortcuts when it comes to doing things properly. You might get away with a cut corner in the short term, but eventually it will catch up to you.

In the late 1990s / early 2000s I worked for an Internet company trying to launch a regional search engine (longisland.com). From a distance we watched as investors poured ridiculous amounts of money into Web sites that were more-often-than-not little more than "a good idea" hatched from the brain of a poorly-shaven 20-something. My favorite site was boo.com. Back then it was going to set the fashion world on its ear with its new "business dynamic" of selling designer clothes over the Internet. It burned through $188 million in six months. Its subsequent crash in May, 2000 proved to be a precursor of the tech-bubble bursting that launched the country into the economic troubles of the early 2000s.

Lately we have been learning quite a bit about mortgage brokers and lending institutions taking shortcuts and, quite frankly, providing mortgages for people who had no right signing on the bottom line. There's lots of blame to go around for this fiasco, and as expected our friends on Capitol Hill are lining up for the opportunity to get on camera so they can "demand answers" well past the point where those answers will do us any good.

Had everyone done their job when they were supposed to, of course, we would not find ourselves in this economic mess. If the lenders did their due diligence, if the regulators paid attention to what the lenders were doing and if the folks getting the mortgages had exercised responsibility and not signed for something they could not reasonably expect to pay back, then we would still be plodding along - perhaps not as busy as we were during the "boom years" but certainly not floundering as we are now, wondering just where the bottom is.

But they didn't and now we have a mess to clean up. Clean it up we will - hopefully soon - and when we do we will go back to building houses. Sturdy, well built houses that will stand for decades to come. Because when LIBI builders build, you can be sure they will do the right thing.