The Worst Real Estate Agent
When it came time to sell my first home, I was unlucky enough to be the very first client of the realtor that I chose. Many of the things that this realtor did were ridiculous, looking back on them, and most of them are confusing to me to this day.
Our house was a three bedroom ranch house with a small bonus room just off the kitchen. This realtor decided to call it a four bedroom house, and billed it as such. Consequently, when other realtors came to look at the house, they were angry that they had been lied to about the number of bedrooms and had wasted the trip, and one of them actually yelled at me over it. When I finally told our realtor how uneasy this was making me, I was told that her real estate agency was forcing her to list it this way and that she had no control over it. I was unsure about how true that was, and I still believe that she was simply misguided enough to think that fudging the information was going to bring in more buyers.
After about seven months, we finally got an offer. The offer was much lower than my asking price, and we instructed out realtor to negotiate to try to get a few extra thousand. After a few back and forth offers, our realtor reported back that the woman who had made the offer no longer wanted to negotiate and was rescinding her offer, which had only been verbal. Not only had the realtor not gotten the offer on paper, but there was great of confusion over the incident still to come.
A few months later I was lamenting about how we had gotten no more offers since that first one, and our realtor asked me why I didn’t just take that one. I explained that the offer had been so low that I could not, but that I wished the lady had been more willing to negotiate. The realtor looked at me in surprise and told me that the lady had been willing to negotiate and that she didn’t understand what I was talking about. She had no memory of the lady rescinding the offer, and I still don’t know if she had made the story up or if she just had severe memory problems.
It was at this point that I had been through enough with our realtor, and began to look for more competent representation. I had to wait until our contract lapsed, so after it she had represented us for one year, I had to cut her loose. My next real estate agent got us two offers in five months and sold our house. The entire bad realtor affair was an excellent, if expensive, lesson- the important thing to look for when buying or selling a home is experience, experience, experience.