Joseph P. Day
The Great Salesman
Copyright 2009 by Daniel Alef
First Smashwords Edition
ISBN: 9781608043163
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On the night of December 14, 1921, Joseph P. Day concluded what The New York Times called the "World's Greatest Auction Sale." Day had sold 1,574 dwellings in 12 hours, a record that probably still stands today. When he died in 1944, Time Magazine said: "New York City lost a major landmark--a gregarious, white-maned, 70-year-old supersalesman, one of the last of the P. T. Barnum era . . . . Auctioneer Day had sold more real estate in & around New York City than any other single human being in the memory of man." The Time article was titled: "The Great Salesman."
Day lived most of his life in New York City where he was born in 1874. His father John W. Day, was a prosperous producer of soda water, his mother Catherine A. Hayes, a typical housewife of the era. However, Day's childhood was anything but sanguine. His father died when Joe was 5. His mother followed 9 years later, forcing the 14-year-old to quit public school and eke out a living as a clerk in a Manhattan wholesale dry-goods firm, reportedly for $5 to$8 a month. But it was also an opportunity for commercial education. The dry goods store became the proving grounds where he could hone his craft.
Like so many other successful salesmen who clerked at a young age, Day learned the importance of knowing more about the products he sold than his competitors or customers. Aided by an innate sense of people, the ability to appraise customers and instantly and accurately gauge their wants, create the right pitch and redirect their questions to conclude a sale, enabled Day to climb the commercial ladder rapidly.
By the time he was 20 he was one of the firm's best salesmen, but when they refused to increase his salary to $15 a week, a fairly large sum in those days, he resigned and formed a real estate and insurance business with a friend. The friend provided the capital and agreed to make Day a partner if Day could double the business in two weeks. Day did it. Two years later he was producing 90% of the business and decided to establish his own company.
According to The New York Times "it was a matter of fate" that he didn't end up on the insurance side of the business because in 1898 he sold the largest accident policy written up to that time, covering railroad assets in New York City. Selling real estate, however, was his principal focus.
That year Joe married 22-year-old New Yorker Pauline Martindale Pope, a well-educated and lovely lass with bright, sparkling blue eyes, the granddaughter of J. Monroe Taylor, manufacturer of printing presses and the nation's largest producer of baking powder. At one point her mother was the state's oldest female college alumna.
Day and Pauline moved into a home at 34 Grammercy Park, near where Pauline had grown up. They would remain at that residence for the rest of their lives and raise two daughters and six sons.
Selling real estate at the turn of the century was not a highly regarded profession. Time referred to it as being "on a social par with selling patent medicine. Suckers were lured with door prizes of "imported" china and junk jewelry, free lunches and a circus barker's side show."
But Day had new and novel ideas for turning real estate into a highly respected profession and a source of considerable esteem not to mention wealth. Working from his offices in the Commerce Building at 31 Nassau Street, he began an advertising campaign with the slogan "Originator of the Special Sales Days" and "Pioneer of Concentrated Advertising." His ads told the story: Day's company concentrated its advertising of real estate sales through newspapers, booklets, electric signs, large and medium-sized posters, special cards, large fence posters, cards in street railway cars and hand painted wall signs.
His business grew rapidly. In 1907 he placed 150,000 sq. ft. of wall billboards to advertise his real estate sales and auctions; these included the sale of 2,000 lots in six auctions, the Times called it "the most successful lot sales ever held in New York City. He achieved," the paper reported, "a status no other auctioneer could reach by selling $100 million of real estate in the three years ending in 1909." A year later he sold $81 million of real estate.
Real estate auctions were his specialty and he developed his own unique and exceptionally effective auctioneering style, combining showmanship, advertising, a careful and constantly updated study of the real estate market in New York and its environs, and a well-honed due diligence program for the properties he sold. He also eschewed the ubiquitous gavel, opting to pound the stand with his fist for emphasis as he knocked down sales; however, he was clever enough to pad the stand to make sure he didn't break his hand. And if auction prices exceeded what he felt were the property's fair values he had no qualms about instantly quashing the auction.