Reading a revised execution law as a supply line (1998)

On treating a change in the rules as a place to buy from

The 1998 decision developed no new product and discovered no new market. It merely re-read a change in the rules — that an existing disposal procedure, the court auction, had become easier to use — as a design for where the company would buy its stock. That the re-reading was possible at all is inseparable from the fact that this was a company which had already swapped its core business from stone to property dealing to house sales to leasing. An operator with no founding trade to defend finds it easier to choose a new place to stand when the outside conditions move.

What made the business strong later was less that houses could be bought cheaply than that the company kept pricing in the clean-up other firms disliked. Negotiating out occupants, disposing of the possessions left behind — the effort differs with every property, and no sense of the going rate develops without volume. The door the reform opened was open equally to every operator; that the ones left standing were the ones who took on the drudgery shows that the barrier to entry lives in accumulated practice rather than in the statute. Long after the company had itself reduced its dependence on auctions, this form of calculation remained.