Sunday, May 16, 2010

Hiring a Realtor

Okay - you're going to sell your house, first you have to hire a realtor. Seemingly simple, right. Well....here's the bad & the ugly. I'll save the good for next week.

The first realtor we met with was recommended by some of my brother's colleagues. I was a little skeptical when she wouldn't meet with us in the evening, but I rearranged my weekend and the appointment was set for late Sunday afternoon. Our primary objectives of meeting with her was to get some recommendations on how best to spend our limited home-improvement budget and to get an idea on price.

She was very uninterested in the former, blowing off my questions about whether to replace all of the carpet or just some of it or how much we should repaint. But, the real fun started on the third floor, where Petey was in his crate. As we approached the master bedroom, Petey barked at her, once, and she refused to step one foot into the bedroom. She pointed at Petey (in his crate) and said "that dog is going to be a problem." (I was pretty much done with her at this point, since I had just gotten through telling her that he would never be in the house during a showing - I'm not a complete moron, I know that a large black pit bull mix isn't exactly the best accessory for a house on the market.) So, without even seeing the master bath or closet, we went downstairs to discuss the house, or so I thought.

But no, we were not going to discuss the house we were going to talk about her. We got a thirty minute long, extremely detailed discourse on her certifications, her awards, how long she's been in the business and all her listings. She took us through her binder, page-by-page (which was type written - as in on a type writer??). She did bring us some comps but she had aluminum lofts mixed in along with the much smaller two-story town homes, so not exactly apples-to-apples and she didn't seem to understand why we questioned her.

After sitting through this excruciating presentation, we still didn't have any sense on where best to spend our money or have any recommendations on staging (I know my living room furniture is more Salvation Army than Architectural Digest) but we sure knew a lot about her. The real icing on the cake came as we were walking her to the door. She asked my brother to walk her to her car which was less than 150 feet from our front door and it was broad daylight. Yeah, right, I'm going to hire you, to sell my house. AS IF. I think the thing that amused me the most was through all of her looking down her nose at us, every listing she showed us was priced substantially lower than even the smallest houses in this neighborhood (not that we're talking big bucks here, either, but still.....)

1 comment:

Banjoan said...

It's been ages since I've dealt with a realtor-we bought our house 15 years ago and it was relatively painless. I'll be selling my dad's house in the next year, and it's in good shape but mighty dated. I'm sure we may be in for a few down-the-nose glances.