The Big Change...
Ingo Inept, Realtor Ordinaire, told us he was making the jump to a new firm.
“This could work out well,” he said. “Remember how many people we had coming through at the start? New listings always do better. Well, because I was taking your listing to a new company, I could get a new MLS[1] and it would be a fresh listing at a new price.”
And what price was he thinking?
He leaned back and chewed on the earpiece of his glasses[2].
Five hundred and eighty nine thousand dollars.
I really had to wonder how you go to a price like that on something as big as a house. My instincts would be to go for round figures, or at least fives. Ingo liked nines ‘cause it gave the impression of a bargain[3]. I didn’t care.
If that enough of a drop, I wondered.
He continued chewing his glasses. He thought so.
Yeah. Like he COULD think.
“And if we don’t get anything at that, we’ll drop it again. It’s a volatile market.”
Well, no it wasn’t. “Volatile” means explosive and unpredictable. This market was implosive and totally predictable.
But we were willing to take the new shot. We wanted out.
And since we weren’t getting out in time for school, we set a new deadline: We had to have the kids in new schools at the start of the January semester. Failing that…
Well, failing that we were stuck and we might as well pull the house off the market until things got better. You know. After election. No, not the Obama election. Like three/four elections after that.
Yeah. It was looking that bleak.
**
So Ingo was promising us a really fresh start. New website, new ads, new everything. We would even start it off with a new broker’s open house!
Oh boy!
After a few months of absence, Ingo seemed to be a man possessed in these heady days of the NEW! NEW! NEW! Selling of the McLaughlin house. He was there quite a bit and seemed genuinely interested in my schedule and what work there was to be done.
**
Ingo arrived on time for the second broker’s open. I took off for the park with some work.
The park I went to was where we used to take the kids when they were little and it was working as a good metaphor for what I saw going on.
When Lauren was little, there were clean sand pits around the playground equipment. On Sunday mornings you could park, walk through the park; maybe you’d see someone setting up a birthday party in one of the parks shelters[4]. She’s like to walk near the small lake and really liked it if your brought some bread to feed the ducks.
Now there was almost no place to park. Not only were the lots full, but also the roads, on both sides, were parked, leaving a fairly narrow passage. You had to be especially careful at corners. Some cars spilled over into the bikeways.
Every shelter was taken and so was every built in barbeque. They were already being fired up[5] and I wondered did you carry enough wood/coal for the day? Well, I guess they did, except for the people I saw unloading a gas grill and propane tanks from the back of an SUV. Something I saw a couple of times. This was, I suppose, a good way to get around the limited number of barbeques, but…come on. A gas grill? Like the kind you have in your backyard? A big one[6]?
There were balloons everywhere for the parties. Kids were running around and playing the swings and stuff. These were the playthings we stopped bringing our kids to when my daughter suddenly developed a fear of bridges and there was a wooden one on this. Also, there were the used condoms, beer cans, cigarette butts and cat shit in the playground sand[7]. The atmosphere was not what you might call family friendly.
As I sat in my car and made laundry lists of possible projects and made a few calls, I watched several cars pull up and disgorge a wedding party who then tramped around the park taking pictures before they all piled back into the van and left.
There was something[8]essentially SAD about going to a public park, a pretty nice one but far from the nicest I’ve ever seen[9] and having your wedding pictures taken while dodging balloons, used condoms, beer cans and barbecue smoke just didn’t seem romantic. It seemed like a very sad way to spend the happiest day of your life. The indignity afforded the bridesmaids – well, those dresses should have been enough. And the image of the bride getting out of a 1989 Dodge Caravan didn’t help any.
I went home feeling worse than when I left. My daughter was twelve and I was worried about her wedding if we didn’t get out of there.
Yeah. Things stopped making a lot of sense around then.
**
Ingo was there when I got home. What did the realtor’s think?
“The number one thing they said was that they liked the backyard.”
Was this the same group from last time?
We did start out a little better the first few weeks of the five eighty-nine price. There were people coming through. One of which was familiar.
“It was the guy who was looking for a house for his ex-wife and kid again,” Ingo told me. “He said the price was fifteen percent too high.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him to make an offer.”
But he didn’t. We went along for two weeks before I called Ingo to talk about dropping the price.
“School’s just in,” he said. “New people driving by. I think we should leave it just the way it is and see.”
Which I agreed with.
But this was about the time I started to see something disturbing.[10]
There was something awry with the marketing.
Ingo had changed realty companies and the price of the house had changed, but the information on the website for the house was just the same.
I checked the other websites, like Realtor.com and Trulia.com. It was the same thing.
And worse, when I clicked on the contact information for the house, it sent me to a different website in a different county.
I was appalled. I called Ingo. He was flummoxed. He had “a guy”[11] who did the websites for him and he would get right on it.
I watched it the next few days. Nothing happened. I called Ingo again. He seemed annoyed at “his guy”.
Another week. Nothing happened either with the websites or with the house. We dropped the price again. No movement except the guy looking for a house for his ex-wife and their kid came by --- again. And again he said the house price was fifteen percent too high[12].
But now, after six months of doing nothing[13] we were veritable dynamos. After a month we SLASHED the price to five-twenty-five.
“Well,” Ingo told me Mr. Fifteen Percent said when he called. “I see they’re finally coming around on the price.”
“Did you tell him that we were willing to drop but you were suggesting we stay…”
“No. I didn’t see any point in that.”
“Did he express any more interest?”
“Not really. No.”
[1] Multiple Listing Service. Not Major League Soccer. One is much more entertaining than the other.
[2] Most bad actors have a few moves that they do over and over. This was meant to show “deep thought”. He needed to do something to show it since he was incapable of doing it.
[3] Only nineteen ninety-nine!
[5] This was around 10 in the morning.
[6] Like the one the guy next door tried to cook the Thanksgiving turkey on one year when I was a kid in Buffalo. That became one of the regular rotation of “really boring holiday stories”.
[7] The children’s choir at our church was once looking for a place to have an end-of-year picnic for the kids. One of the mothers suggested this park. I replied in an email that we had stopped taking the kids there and she said: “Well, we’re just careful of things like that and that’s what any park anywhere is like.” I’ll be telling more stories like this in my next book: “Self Justification: Polishing the Turds or Modern Life”.
[8] And I’m copping to being a snob here, but if you haven’t picked up on that already you need to ride a shorter bus.
[9] Buffalo being home to a park system designed by Frederick Law Olmstead – go ahead and look it up.
[10] And I mean MORE disturbing that the “for sale” sign outside the house for six months and the cat shit in the yard and
[11] I wonder how many “guys” like this are out there and how they survive in a world where building a website CAN be as easy as starting an email account – not that there aren’t people who find that hard. But, really, setting up a website with some pictures, some canned midi music and a click through for contact? My daughter could do that when she was ten. I could do it by the time I turned forty.
[12] While home prices were dropping, his standard was, apparently, constant.
[13] You know, except for trying to work in a house with little of the stuff I needed, taking care of the kids and dealing with whatever lunacy the neighborhood decided to drop on us.
Entire contents copyright 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin
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