Daily Real Estate News  |  September 16, 2005  |   Storm-Affected Practitioners Share Stories of Personal Loss
Frank Beckendorf’s new home—very likely for the long-term—is Abilene, Texas.

His journey there was fraught with trauma. He arrived with his wife, Jean, and their three children after driving 19 hours from Chalmette, La., a suburb of New Orleans, during the big evacuation before Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29. His sister, who lived two blocks from his house, drowned in the flooding after refusing to evacuate.

Beckendorf, 53, was a sales associate with Real Estate Results in Chalmette, La. In the weeks since he fled the Gulf Coast, Beckendorf has learned from friends who returned to their homes that what’s left in Louisiana is a flooded house covered with a layer of nonrefined crude oil from a spill in a nearby community. All the Beckendorfs' worldly possessions, except for what they brought in their car, are destroyed. After they evacuated, the family spent a few days at a friend’s house; since then, they've moved around to five motels in the area.

But Frank Beckendorf hasn't lost heart. In his newly adopted city, good Samaritans have showered his family with unbelievable generosity. “You wouldn’t believe the outpouring of support we've received,” he says. “This community has adopted us. People slip money under our doors. One day, someone slipped three brand-new shirts under our door. The motel clerks, who don’t make any money, demanded to buy us three new backpacks.”

Perfect strangers have given them gift cards for Wal-Mart, and “it’s insane” the amount of cash they have been given, Beckendorf says. Yesterday, a young woman gave his wife a check for $200. Although the family took only two days’ worth of clothes from their home, they “have enough clothes to stock Wal-Mart right now,” he says.

The Wylie Independent School District in Abilene has enrolled his two younger children with no questions asked, and 19-year-old Jill, who was a sophomore on a full-ride scholarship at Loyola University in New Orleans, was matriculated at no cost at Hardin-Simmons University, a private college in Abilene.

Being on the receiving end of such graciousness and generosity has truly been an eye-opening experience for Beckendorf.

“It makes you wonder whether I have done that for people in need in the past,” he says. “It changes your whole outlook on charitable contributions and people in need. We are on the receiving end. So now we know what it feels like.”

The Beckendorfs are starting to rebuild their lives in Texas, he says. His wife used to live there and still holds a license in the state as a dental hygienist. She found a part-time job in a dentist’s office already and has started to work. After the Texas Real Estate Commission announced earlier this week that it's working on a proposal to grant temporary real estate licenses to displaced hurricane victims, Beckendorf began searching for a broker to sponsor him.

Beckendorf is a native of New Orleans but says the longer he's in Texas, the less likely he'll be to go back. “Staying in Texas—that’s a possibility to a probability,” Beckendorf says. “There’s nothing back there right now. Everything’s going to have to be bulldozed. You’re going to have flat land in the months to come. So what is it going to take me—a year to just get a contractor to build my house back up again? It’s just not going to be the same.”

Does he feel a sense of responsibility to go back and help rebuild his hometown? “I have a responsibility to my kids and my family to provide as much stability as possible," he says. "I don’t know what they would have to do to convince me to return.”

‘Everything’s Going to Be Good’

A real estate practitioner who did return is Don Borngesser, broker-owner of Borngesser Realty Co. LLC in Metairie, La.

When he was forced to flee from his home in the face of the worst hurricane in U.S. history, the decision of what to take with him was an easy one. Into his 1999 Chrysler Concorde went boxes and boxes of all of his business records and the love of his life—his Labrador retriever, Snookey.

The 73-year-old commercial practitioner is a resilient free-spirit with a hustler’s instinct that saw him through the Korean War and Hurricane Betsy, a powerful storm in 1965—considered one of the most destructive hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States—that caused quite a bit of damage to his home.

Borngesser says he has lived in the New Orleans area since 1962, and he’s left only once due to hurricane conditions. When officials told residents to evacuate in the days before Hurricane Katrina, he was initially determined to stay, so he went out and bought a blow-up raft, oars, and lifejackets for himself and Snookey. He also bought plywood and began boarding up the 10-foot windows in his ultramodern home in Metairie. He did the same for a small shopping center he owns in nearby Harahan in Jefferson Parish.

Despite these preparations, he decided at the last minute to heed the advice of authorities and hit the road at 6:15 p.m. on Aug. 28. His destination? A Holiday Inn in Blytheville, a small city in northeast Arkansas 500 miles away. He said he'd called around for motels that had rooms available and that was the closet thing he could find. Moving from motel to motel, he traveled to St. Joseph, Mo., where his only relative, a sister, lives.

Borngesser made his way back to Metairie on Wednesday afternoon to find that his home had sustained six inches of flooding. He found “black stuff" in his swimming pool and eight downed trees in his front yard, three of which had punctured the outside of his home. Just a few people have returned to the block, including his neighbors across the street, who sustained only minor damage to their garage.

Borngesser says he will start the slow process of rebuilding his life and business and is optimistic that things will be just fine. Surviving on lunch meat, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and granola bars—because most of the businesses around him are still closed—Borngesser says the first order of business is to clean out his refrigerator. Then he’ll pull up his moldy carpets and take down the moldy drywall.

Despite the prospect of spending months to rebuild his home, Borngesser retains his good nature. “I refuse to have a negative thought,” he says. “If you’re in business for yourself, you’re always hustling. You may get knocked down but you pick yourself up.

“Nothing’s changed,” Borngesser continues. “I was an obnoxious jerk before the storm, and I still am. I’m still me.

“Everybody’s got problems, right?” he says. “The biggest problem I have in the world right now is that I can’t get the blinds to go down. But everything’s going to be good.”

She Has Faith, Too

Wonda Pearson knows that she lucked out.

The broker-owner of Realty Plus in Biloxi, Miss., says her office received no damage and her home was only partially damaged by a toppled tree that punched a hole in her roof. But her career is at a stand-still due to the property damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. After the storm, she felt she had to get out of the city for awhile to regroup. So on Sept. 3, she drove to Nashville, Tenn., and checked into a hotel.

While Pearson was checking her e-mail at a lobby computer, a guest learned she was a real estate practitioner. The two talked about the storm's impact on the Biloxi market. The guest had just bought a fractional share in a new hotel-condo in Destin, Fla., and he recommended that Pearson contact his broker if she needed a temporary place to hang her license.

Pearson contacted the broker, who encouraged Pearson to join her company. “It was just through that chance meeting,” Pearson says.

To Pearson, hotel-condo sales represent a new niche, but she says the experience will come in handy once Biloxi recovers; there's a hotel-condo under development in the city. Pearson marvels that she could end up expanding the breadth of her business in a way she otherwise wouldn't have considered.

Next week, Pearson will travel to Florida, where she'll look into license reciprocity requirements and meet with the Destin broker for the first time. On the way, she says she'll stop in Biloxi. Before Hurricane Katrina hit, Pearson had just closed a substantial sales transaction and had a few mortgage deals pending. Right now, she's unsure what will become of those deals. She also has three rental properties she manages. They're all occupied, so she hasn't been able to offer units in them to the people who've called her since the storm looking for rentals.

Because she has no income currently, the temporary move to Florida is critical for holding off bankruptcy. She's already missed a lease payment on her office, but she's confident the building owners will be flexible while she regroups.

“I have to keep my focus on the possibilities, not the reality, and stay excited each day,” Pearson says.

—Haley M. Hwang and Robert Freedman for REALTORŪ Magazine Online