Robert Bruss; 'Real Estate Mailbag' Columnist

Robert J. Bruss, 67, a real estate lawyer and broker whose nationally syndicated advice columns earned him the nickname "the Dear Abby of real estate," died Sept. 26 at his home in Hillsborough, Calif., south of San Francisco. He had complications of colon cancer.

Mr. Bruss wrote seven columns a week, including his "Real Estate Mailbag" question-and-answer feature. He also explained what he believed were revealing developments in real estate law and taxes, and reviewed books with real estate themes.

Besides his columns -- which appeared weekly in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other major newspapers -- he also published two monthly newsletters. His book "The Smart Investor's Guide to Real Estate" (1981) has appeared in multiple editions.

Kenneth R. Harney, a housing and real estate columnist syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group, said Mr. Bruss's consumer-oriented columns benefited from his legal education as well as his experience as an active investor in small-scale rental properties.

"He really cared about the consumers' interest, no matter what other issues might arise about Realtors or lawyers like himself or settlement service providers," Harney said. "He made points of saying commissions are too high, and there should be alternative ways to compensate real estate professionals. He was fairly unstinting on criticisms of overcharges on real estate settlements."

Robert Jacques Bruss was born May 2, 1940, in Minneapolis. He was a 1962 business administration graduate of Northwestern University and a 1967 graduate of the University of California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

He once described a turning point in his ambitions after attending Northwestern. At the time, he had just read William Nickerson's best-selling book "How I Turned $1,000 Into a Million in Real Estate in My Spare Time."

He became an investment sales manager with Grubb and Ellis, a real estate brokerage in San Francisco. He later managed his rental properties, mostly houses, apartments and commercial buildings. He gradually phased into single-family homes, writing his column in the mornings and then visiting potential new properties in the afternoons.

He began self-syndicating his columns in 1975, at first relying on a $2 weekly fee from small publications. He described his "first big break" as the moment The Post offered a fivefold increase -- $10 a week. "At that time," he told the Seattle Times in 1985, "I would have paid The Washington Post $10 a week to take me."

Tribune Media Services of Chicago distributed his column from 1979 to 2003, when he went with the California-based syndicators Inman News, run by a friend. His work now runs in more than 175 newspapers and on many real estate Web sites.

He said he detested the lucrative real-estate seminar circuit, instead preferring to teach real estate law classes at a community college in San Mateo, Calif.

Mr. Bruss never married and leaves no immediate survivors.