tim's experiment

Interesting story in Sunday’s Post about the Real Estate Developers’ Association, which has apparently commissioned a very expensive PR firm (nothing but the best for our plutocrats) to find out what the public thinks of them and why. The first interesting thing about this piece of news is that it was not new. It was published the previous Tuesday here: http://biglychee.com/ We blogistas have to stick together.

The second funny thing about it is that the real estate moguls are going to pay a lot of money for something which many people would be happy to tell them for free. Many of us would be happy to have the chance to tell a selection of real estate developers what we think of them, which would go roughly like this:

The real estate business is populated entirely by lying scum whose attitude to ordinary people is much like that of shearers to ordinary sheep. They deploy shoals of legal landsharks to find loopholes in the laws designed to ensure that new buildings are reasonable in size, inoffensive in appearance and consistent with the government’s view of what would be in the public interest in the area concerned. Aided by subtle corruptionof the relevant parts of the civil service this enables them to inflict on our urban landscape buildings which are gross, ugly and frequently deployed in a way which not only spoils the view for everyone else but effectively prevents them from even seeing it. The industry’s ethics are non-existent, its aesthetics abysmal, and faced with a real estate developer as a potential son-in-law most of us would feel a strong preference for an ordinary decent murderer.  Added to these offences is their malign influence on public policy, which includes preventing the government from running a decent public housing programme, and slagging off the Chief Executive in Beijing if he does not share REDA’s bloated opinion of its importance to the local economy. We blame real estate developers largely for the fact that accomodation in Hong Kong is hideously expensive, and considerably for the shortcomings of our political system. Also we don’t like them. Too many come across in public as arrogant fatcats with antediluvian politics and obnoxious personalities.

As to what the expensive PR people will think up to remedy this situation, the mind — as they say — boggles. I am not going to try to help this bunch of bandits but some of the more objectionable individuals might improve the overall average perception if they contrived to drop dead in the street.