The news just keeps on flowing — and almost all of it bad. In real estate, as in financial markets, there are always the people and companies that focus on the other side of bad news: I’ll call it the "Street of Opportunity."

If you sit and listen to the commentary on the current financial crisis, 98 percent of the information flowing is about why it happened and who is to blame. The funny thing about the "why" and "who" conversation is that there are hundreds of different opinions. Many of these opinions emerge from very smart analysts and commentators. This is the same group of very smart business leaders who drove their companies right out of business. If we have learned anything from this crisis it’s that you do not have to be dumb to lose lots of money.

While there are hundreds of different opinions on why this happened and a vast number of people, firms, institutions and government agencies to blame, no one on this so-called Street of Opportunity even cares.

On this street, people and companies respond with a sense of excitement and enthusiasm. On Wall Street, meanwhile, you can find various types of people leaving the Lehman Brothers building: those who are angry at the company for burning them and those who are grateful for what they gave the company and what the company gave them. There are those who are mad at all the years wasted. And others who will take the experience, leverage a better career from lessons learned, and end up making more money.

There are those who, despite all the warnings that the company was in danger, are disappointed that the company let them down. And others who blame only themselves, taking full responsibility for believing that the market would change — they accept the fact that as individuals we make right decisions and wrong ones. There are people who thought that a 150-year-old company could never go out of business, and there are those who accept that in business today longevity is no guarantee of a future.

Sure, we can blame the rating agencies, the SEC chairman and regulators. But on the Street of Opportunity, people and firms place a high value on time and know there is not much money to make in the Complaint Department. In addition, no one ever smiles in the Complaint Department, and who wants that?

Scott Einbinder is a national real estate speaker and trainer.

***

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