The Latest Iteration of the Greater Fool Market

Yes, Iceman, I saw the house and I have to tell you, there is nothing new under the sun. Just a somewhat different manifestations augmented by technology.

We all have heard the true stories of people buying non habitable swamp land sight unseen; of fraudsters selling land that didn't own and of this special piece of history, which bears some similarity to land that is "non fungible"....(there's am oxymoron for you)

Binder Boys’ Busted Boom

By Cinnamon Bair
Posted Aug 29, 2005 at 8:21 AM
"The young fortune seekers who swarmed Florida in 1925 are among the odder phenomena in state history.
Feeding off an already frenzied real estate market, they swept in from the North hoping to make fast, easy money. They bought and sold land faster than most kids trade baseball cards.

For one crazed year, the socalled “binder boys” became a driving force in Florida’s real estate boom, but their ridiculously inflated land prices also became the boom’s undoing.

“Of all the dubious speculators, the unscrupulous `binder boys’ came to symbolize the basically manic character of this fantasy paper kingdom,” Gene Burnett wrote in “Florida’s Past, Volume 1.”

In the 1920s, real estate practically eclipsed tourism and agriculture as the state’s major industry. Fueled by developers who touted Florida’s mild climate and excellent investment prospects, buyers were all too eager to get in on the action.

“By 1920 many persons had purchased Everglades real estate, much of it without even seeing it,” Paul George wrote in the July 1986 Florida Historical Quarterly.

Within four years, real estate transactions were taking place faster than county governments could record them. Investors did not want to slow down just because the clerks couldn’t keep up -- a sentiment that allowed the binder boys to slide into the gap.

Binder boys worked by placing a very small down payment -- a binder -- on a property with a promise to pay the balance within a set amount of time. In the meantime, the land was guaranteed to them. The binder boys, who had no intention of actually buying the property, sold their binders to someone else at a higher price. More often than not, the new buyer turned around and sold the binder again at a yet higher price.

“A lot’s price would spiral (upward) many times on one binder while each link-buyer in this dizzy daisy chain reaped a windfall profit,” Burnett wrote.......

“There, skilled binder boys (sometimes, `Haven-Villa boys’) plied the unwary with sweet tales of the golden opportunities that they simply could not afford to miss,” Brown wrote.


The house of cards collapsed in 1926, destroying the paper fortunes the binder boys had so haphazardly constructed. The young hustlers left the state as quickly as they’d appeared, but memories of the binder boys linger to remind us of the era’s excesses.

Cinnamon Bair is a Polk County native. She can be reached at cinbair@hotmail.com."