“They took your spouse? Sell the house!”
The Austin realtor who posted this controversial sign in a predominantly Mexican American part of New Braunfels near W. San Antonio and South Mesquite streets last week said he got the idea from a client whose wife cheated on him, suggesting it would make a funny ad.
But some in the New Braunfels community didn’t think the joke was clever because these words exactly describe what’s going on in many neighborhoods in Texas and across the United States, where thousands of immigrants and even American citizens are being arrested without warrants by masked agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“‘Cheating spouse? Sell the House’ is what he would have done if that was really his intent,” a Comal County resident posted on social media. “Not buying this BS story.”
On Friday, Chris Watters, the licensed real estate broker who owns Watters International Realty, bowed to public pressure and removed the wrap from a billboard located on the grounds of a tire store.
“To be brutally honest, I was kind of shocked to hear people reference that,” he said. “I have a lot of team members, you know, that are Latino. My wife is 100% Latina. My kids are half Latino. My sister-in-law is half Latina and lives down the road from that billboard. So yeah it was a big surprise to see that people referenced it as having something to do with ICE.”
None of the approximately 100 people who reviewed the idea at staff meetings in March thought it had anything to do with ICE either, Watters said.
The same language appears on some company billboards in Austin, San Antonio and Waco. Watters International Realty has around 120 signs posted in areas along the I-35 corridor, including 15 in New Braunfels.
“They’re all different billboards,” he said. “They don’t all say the same thing. There’s like all kinds of different messaging on them, but our overall marketing strategy with billboards is trying to make somebody smile when they go down the highway.”
According to Zillow.com, Watters is one of the “top 100 most influential real estate agents in Texas.”
In 2022, the managing editor of the Austin Business Journal said he leads a team “that has turned the art of selling into a science.”
The tired old “They’re arresting immigrants without warrants” ploy again?