Praise to realtors
For 12 years I have lived in my current home and there are lots of things I love about it. The location is perfect, not far from a major highway but still with a country feel. It also has
access to shopping, a theater and has a nice quiet road to walk on safely, which has been a godsend these past five months with our gyms closed. I know they are back open but I can’t wear a mask running on a treadmill, so long walks are on the menu for now.
I do like my home but it also has some drawbacks. We’ve added a few dogs since I purchased it and they need more room to run around and act silly. I also have a very public job and my house doesn’t offer me the
privacy I’d prefer. Example, having people pull over if they see me mowing the lawn and then “pitching me” on a story idea they have for television or this newspaper.
I’ll plead guilty to being a bit of a workaholic but when I go home I am not in work mode and don’t want to be. I once had a waitress interrupt my wife and me during a very serious discussion to say, “You know what story you should be doing…” She then launched into something I wasn’t paying attention to, forcing me to say, “Why don’t you email me the information and I’ll take a look.” She glared at me and said, “Why don’t I just tell you now?” Forcing me to say, “Because we are in the middle of something important and personal and I’d like to get back to my wife.”
I’m still hopeful she didn’t do anything to my grilled cheese sandwich after that exchange.
Getting back on topic, I was talking about the drawbacks to my home. For the first time in a decade my wife and I are looking at possibly selling and moving
farther out into the country. Full disclosure, I know nothing about buying and selling houses, other than to say I know it’s a pain in the backside. Lots of paperwork and everyone seems to line up to take some of your money. Still, for many years I have always raised my eyebrows when I heard that Realtors got five or six percent of the sale price.
That always sounded high to me. Boy was I wrong.
In the last few weeks I’ve been working with a Realtor and you couldn’t pay me enough to do that job. For starters you spend a lot of time working for free.
People ask you to do all sorts of things for them, beyond just finding them a home, and there’s nothing in it for you unless they buy. If they make you run around for a month and then get cold feet, you are out of luck. And, let’s just be honest here, dealing with the public is absolute madness.
People will tell a Realtor they want a big house. When the Realtor finds them one and emails it over, they have all the information they’d need right on the website. It lists how many rooms, how many square feet, everything inside and out. Then the person says they want to see the house but they can’t go during the day because they work and they can only go at night if it’s after six but before eight and its a full moon
When they get to the house, they walk around and say, “Wow, this is way too big. How many square feet is this?” And the Realtor says, “Thirty-six-hundred, just like it said on the website I sent you. Twice.” This is followed by, “Oh, no. It has a pool? I don’t swim.”
Which leads the Realtor to pound their own head into a wall.
On the flip side you have the sellers who can be even worse. We went to look at a house and the owners refused to leave. So, I’m walking around their kitchen and they are literally peeking at me through the window.
Sellers also lie. Wait, that sounds harsh. Let’s just say they mislead. We looked at a house which described a beautiful, quiet neighborhood. When we got there, the neighbor’s fence was falling down and missing a few sections. Behind what was left of the fence was enough playground equipment and ropes and tunnel slides that someone could train for that ninja show on TV.
Another home said it has a “lake view.”
If you stood on the homes roof, on a ladder, in January with no leaves on the trees, you might be able to see a sliver of a lake a quarter mile away.
And I haven’t even talked about the security issue. Female Realtors meeting up with strangers in remote locations is dangerous and I worry for them.
I don’t know if we’ll sell our home or find a new one in the country but I do know if we sell, that Realtor will earn her money. You know that phrase thank a farmer? I think we should because they help put food on the table.
While you’re at it though, thank a Realtor because they find a home to put that kitchen table in.