Readers might be surprised by how many of Potter’s anecdotes concern fistfights with movie theater workers and rental-car company managers, altercations with police, and “yell fests” with a detested colleague whose wife’s resemblance to Salma Hayek has dampened Potter’s affection for the actress. Potter admits he’s taking liberties with readers’ expectations: “How this relates to commercial real estate, I couldn’t really tell you,” he confesses after recounting a dust-up. But his raucous storytelling, with its focus on conflict, illuminates the advice he gives to readers who want to be “Kong Dong” sales managers: “Be acutely aware of [your] scope of power.”
Questions of power figure into Potter’s more advice-focused chapters. They also play out in his discussions of how brokers stereotype various ethnic populations. There's humor in scenes such as Potter sitting under a desk on the brokerage floor in search of relative quiet. The fast-paced stream-of-consciousness storytelling, which reads like it came straight out of the author’s Dictaphone, isn’t always coherent, but readers will skim past the typos and tangled sentences in a rush of secondhand adrenaline. If action movies were made about real estate, this book would be one.
Takeaway: This vigorous memoir will entertain anyone looking for an action-comedy peppered with fistfights and commercial real estate deals.
Great for fans of Alison Rogers’s Diary of a Real Estate Rookie, Joe Ricketts’s The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A-
Editing: C
Marketing copy: A