A "Lesson Learned" Interlude


If we’d had a stand-up guy like Tripper from the start, not only would we have been out of there much sooner, the family would have been under a lot less stress for a prolonged period of time, the kids would have started school at the beginning of the year, we would have had a decent amount of time to look for a home, we would have been able to drive across the country…

AND we probably would have done all that with a hundred thousand dollars more in our pocket.

Seriously.

The first week the house was up someone offered a five hundred and Ingo laughed it off. The house was RIDICULOUSLY over priced for seven months. I have a part of that. Patricia has a part of that. The SoCal real estate market has a huge part of that.

But no one owns a bigger piece of that than that piece of feces Ingo.[1]

To begin:

We’re not freakin’ Realtors. It’s not out job, our career, our expertise to know how to price and get houses sold.

Now, more than a year later and able to watch “House Hunters” and “Property Ladder” without hyperventilating, I know that if a house doesn’t sell in a month, at the outside two, you have to do something with the price. If your traffic drops, you have to do something with the price. If you really want to move, you have to do something with the price.

I had asked him, Mr. Realtor Ingo:

“Is it time to look at the price?”

“Oh, not yet.”

Yeah. Right. And he did this to make money.

I said it before. I’ll say it again.[2] We got away okay.

I mean we made a profit and that’s good.

But we went through hell. Patricia tells everyone that it was the worst year of our marriage and I’ll agree with that to the extent that I won’t even attempt to make a joke about it.

Proof positive of what a fuck-up Ingo was is that Tripper was able to do in less than thirty days what Ingo couldn’t do in seven months.

And it’s not his fault. It’s mine for putting up with it. For not educating myself more on the home sales process and for thinking he knew something I didn’t when it came to selling houses [3].

Lesson learned.

Money gone.

Me Pissed off.

Stop writing like Tonto now. Me part Algonquin. Offend self.

ENTIRE CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin


[1] And I say that with all sincerity.

[2] I say it every night when I’m going to sleep in the hopes I won’t wake up and want to kill someone.

[3] Because, you know, it was what he did.

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