Showings -- The Early, Optimistic Days...

So we asked Ingo to give us at least forty-five minutes notice before someone came over. That way we could keep the house in a decent state of readiness and could do a quick vacuum/Fabreeze spray and not get surprised in my underwear.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people do things last minute. When I was doing a little acting, I almost never got a call to go to a casting session a day or two in advance. It was always a ten AM call to be across town at eleven. Occasionally they’d call the day before[1]. I mean didn’t they KNOW they were going to have to cast something at least a week in advance? Did they get to the office that morning and have three phone calls:

“We need a cop, a mechanic and a Pope and we need it cast before noon!”

But everyone seems to do things at the last minute and operate at a def con 9 level of panic on a regular basis. It may keep the growth hormone running, keep wait down and make sure your adrenal glands never get too bored, but it sure is a pain in the ass.

Stage one of the sale is a “realtor’s open house” which, to no one’s surprise, is when one realtor invites a bunch of other realtor’s over to look at a house that the first realtor has put up for sale. Which I GUESS sort of makes sense. It would seem to me that you’d be more interested in showing the house to people who might BUY it, but showing it to the people who might help people who might buy it find it…

It just seems like Americans are intent on adding layers on layers, like winter clothing from an L.L. Bean catalogue instead of just getting things done.

But I cleared out. It was the first week in March and the kids were in school and Patricia was at her office so I just had to make myself scarce.

Ingo showed up with his signs and gave me a long speech about all the things he’d done to get ready for this[2] and how we had a spiffy ad running that weekend in the paper. He put a sign out in front of the house and I drove away, happy in the thought that my long California nightmare was about to end.

Understand: We didn’t have a firm idea of where we were going. We just knew we were going. When my kids would ask where we were going, I’d tell them:

“It’s an adventure!”

And I’d whistle the Indiana Jones theme.

Eventually, they started answering the same way. On some level, that made me think maybe I was a bad parent on the level of the Irish Travelers who went from town to town conning people.

But, you know, I was open to a career change.

Ingo informed that he thought the showing to the realtors went well.

“But it’s not like two years ago,” he said in a phrase that I was to come to know too well. “Then you would have come home and there would have been two guys having a fist fight on the front lawn to buy the house.”

Well, that was a nice picture. And why wasn’t it happening?

“So did they like it?”

“The number one top thing they said was that they LOVED the backyard!” He said.

Well, that was great, but do backyards really sell houses?

“Well, there was a lot of talk about there being only one bathroom. But it is what it is[3], isn’t it? You’re not going to add another bathroom.

Well, not after it had gone on sale, no. Then there’d be a lot of dust and stuff around. Bad for showings.

There were quite a few showings the first week. Ingo had told us that he wasn’t going to do a lock box – one of those little contraptions that go on the front of the house that realtor’s can magically access so they can come see the house. Ingo didn’t like doing them at all and certainly in the price range of the house we were selling because you never knew who might be coming through.

This seemed like a really good thing to me. If I didn’t like drop overs, I sure didn’t want people tromping through my house and Ingo told us he was afraid of realtors who didn’t call ahead and just showed up with clients. Ingo, clearly, had our best interests at heart. But there was the fact that we’d cleared so much stuff out of the house that it was unlikely there was anything there that someone would steal that I would actually care about them stealing. They could have the thirty-two inch TV that we were so thrilled about owning when we bought it and watched Nirvana on MTV. Digital was coming and that thing would be worth shit then.

He’d call, usually giving me plenty of warning and I’d clear out. Then he’s call back with the results, usually that evening. It worked pretty well. There were people showing up almost every day.

One evening he called and said he’d gotten a phone call on the house.

I was excited. We were only a week in. Would we be able to stretch escrow so that the kids could finish school in the summer? Would there be more to pack?

In an amused voice, Ingo said:

“He said he’d seen the house on realtor.com and would offer five-hundred K, sight unseen.”

I thought about it for a moment.

“Should we talk about it?” I said.

He laughed.

“It’s not serious until they put it in writing!” He said in the same tone my older brothers used to tell me that Superman wasn’t real. “Anybody can call and say anything. That’s why no offer’s real until it’s put in writing. I told him that I’d offer him twenty k for his car right now if that’s the way he wanted to do business.[4]”

“But should we talk about the price?”

“Too early for that.”

And that was that.

In literature, this is called “foreshadowing”.

---

[1] Often while I was in another country. No lie.

[2] Which, it turned out, was what anyone who ever thought about selling anything would have done.

[3] As President Reagan would say: “There you go again.”

[4] And if you want to know what the sound of a hundred K going away sounds likes --- that’s it.

ENTIRE CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin