Buyers | Love's Real Stories

October 6, 2020

Password, Please

We were on a Zoom call and somebody said, “Why am I ‘required’ to change passwords all the time? I’m sick of it. I can’t keep track of all my stupid passwords because I’m always changing them! I change passwords like I change my socks!”

The Computer Tech guy was on the call and he said, “You protect yourself by locking your house don’t you? You lock your car don’t you? You protect your online house by locking the doors with new passwords.”

It brought to mind a recent crime against one of our Real Estate clients. The crime went down this way:

Jason Anderson hit “Send” on his laptop screen, instantly delivering $37,429.87 from his bank account, by electronic wire fund transfer, to the Title Company handling his escrow for the purchase of his first home. The money is Jason’s down payment and closing costs.

On the receiving end, it’s not the Title Company at all who is receiving the wire transfer of Jason’s money. Rather, it is some faceless fraudster creep who undoubtedly rubs his hands together in glee. He has successfully coerced another sucker into sending him great sums of money. The faceless fraudster hits a few buttons on his keyboard, and Jason’s money is moved to another account and then another account, fake names and numbers are attached, and it can’t be traced or found by anyone other than the faceless fraudster creep.

Jason calls his Realtor, Pam.

“Hey Pam,” says Jason, “I guess we’re getting ready to close escrow. At last, the house will be mine!”

“Yes!” says Pam. “Finally! Loan Approval!”

Jason’s loan approval was a tough one. As a self-employed contractor, he didn’t fit in all the loan boxes of the ideal buyer, so he had to come up with more down payment money, including $15,000 from his Grandparents.

“So when do we close?” asked Jason, “I just wired my closing money to the Title Company.”

“Wait. What? We’re not closing for a week!” said Pam.

“The Title Company sent me an email that gave me the wiring instructions. They said they needed it by ten o’clock. So I wired the closing funds from my bank account. Right?”

But those wiring instructions came from the faceless fraudster, who had hacked his way into Jason’s email account.

The fraudster employs the devious technique of hacking email passwords, then scanning inboxes for money-related emails. He finds emails about a transaction underway then waits for the right time to order his victim to cough up the money. He sends a spoof email that looks just like it came from the victim’s Title Company, Realtor, attorney, lender, bank, you name it.

There are lots of fraudsters. They have sucked up lots of money from victims like Jason.

Katie Johnson, General Counsel for the National Association of Realtors says wire fraud is the number one “legal friction point” for Realtors. “Millions of dollars are lost this way,” she said. “Once they send it, the money is gone.” She laid out the rules for protecting against the fraudsters.

Never send money without verifying with a phone call.
Change your email password every two weeks.

Jason lucked out. His fraudster messed up his own wiring instructions and had to physically go to the bank to straighten it out. The Title Company fraud investigators busted him.

Jason bought his house, and the fraudster is now a faceless fraudster creep in jail. But there are many more fraudsters scanning email inboxes right now, for all kinds of stuff, not just Real Estate.

Change your password, whether or not you change your socks. Right now!

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December 14, 2019

Roof Respect

I climbed up on my roof again last week to clean the gutters and blow off the leaves. Every time I take the ladder and lean it up against the roof edge to make the climb, I hear inside my head the impatient voice of John James Miskella, roofer extraordinaire.

“Don’t EVER lean the ladder against the roof edge!” He would say. “The roofing material hangs over for a reason. It’s the drip edge! The drip edge sheds water. If you crush it with the ladder, you lose the edge. You make a nice place for water to seep under the roofing and begin its insidious soaking of the sheathing and rafters. Then what do you have? DRY ROT!”

Miskella got into my head about 30 years ago and stayed there. John James and his dad before him installed the roofing on a large percentage of the houses in Chico from the 1950’s forward. John James was the guy Realtors like me called to do roof inspections for home buyers.

“Lean the ladder against a side wall or a fascia board, for crying out loud!” said John James. “And cover the tops of the ladder rails with fabric so you don’t mark up the siding or the fascia boards.”

Miskella’s ladders had raggedy t-shirts duct-taped to the tops of the ladders.

“Happy Homeowners just don’t RESPECT their own roof!” said John James. ‘Happy Homeowners’ was term Miskella used to reference to amateurs like me, who in his mind are the enemies of the roof.

“They treat roof work like yard work,” said John James. “They run all over the place, dragging their tools here and there, tearing up the roofing material like a bull in a muddy field!”

John James would shake his head. “And they stomp all debris into the roofing material causing irreparable damage.”

“And now we have to contend with these satellite and cable tv installers!” he said. “They care less about their heavy foot traffic and dragging their stuff all over the place than the Happy Homeowner!”

He shakes his head again. “NO RESPECT!”

At a house in the Avenues in Chico one summer day, I met John James Miskella for a roof inspection. He hopped out of his battered, tar-stained pickup, and began his survey of the place.

“Uh oh,” he said with quiet concern. “We have a real Happy Homeowner here.” A ladder leaned up against the roof edge, perhaps a permanent fixture. The drip edge of the roofing was crushed in various spots from ladder placement.

“New satellite dish up there,” he said with increasing alarm.

In practically one motion, Miskella flipped the ladder off his truck, stood it next to the house, raised the extension, and lightly leaned the tops of the rails soundlessly against the sidewall. He scampered up the ladder to the roof like a cat. I lumbered up behind.

“Walk like this,” he said. “Keep your feet flat. Small steps. Don’t skid!” John James Miskella was a big guy, but he traveled the roof weightlessly, stooping now and then to carefully touch the surface.

“Too late,” he said sadly. “In the summer they skidded their feet and ran all over the place mushing up the warm, soft roofing. In the winter they came back up and stomped on the little ridges they created and cracked ‘em open.” He kneeled and laid his hand on a cracked area as if he were trying to heal a wound.

“They killed a perfectly good roof,” he said.

John James glared at me. “I have a message for all your Happy Homeowners,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Tell ‘em John James Miskella says to give their roof some RESPECT!”

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August 14, 2015

All Kinds

“It takes two to tango, babe,” said my old mentor KDV, “and it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round.” KDV was referring to the diversity of people we encounter in the Real Estate job. Soon after, I found an example.

“So you work for The Man, huh?” said my new client Robbie Burns, as we drove toward a property he wanted to see.

“The Man?” I said.

“Yeah, The Man. You know, the Fat-Cats who run the corporations like your Real Estate outfit who are funding the Industrial-Military complex, destroying our natural resources and selling it off for billions in profit, all blessed by our conservative capitalist Government. The system is designed to keep us all distracted. Instead of worrying about our freedoms being taken away, The Man wants us to be happy tuning into a ball-game and eating fast food!”

I reflexively glanced at my car radio dial tuned to 680 AM, the station for Sports-talk radio and the San Francisco Giants. I had been listening to that day’s baseball game on my way to meet Robbie. I eyeballed the floor behind the passenger seat and spied a Taco Bell wrapper peeking out from underneath.

“Have you always been a corporate guy?” asked Robbie.

“Well, I’m originally from Berkeley,” I said.

Robbie looked surprised.

“Telegraph Avenue,” I said, “the riots, People’s Park, the whole bit.”

“Wow,” said Robbie, “and here you are workin’ for The Man!”

I wrote an offer for Robbie on a house on the South end of town, and I visited the Listing Agent’s office to present it to the seller, Mr. Bailey.

“Good riddance to the place,” said Mr. Bailey. “I’m selling off that rental and moving away. No more paying taxes to our liberal corrupt Government for me, you know what I mean? My tenant has more rights to the place than I do.”

I presented Robbie’s offer.

“FHA loan, huh?” said Mr. Bailey. “Another socialist program, if you ask me.” Mr. Bailey went on about our government subsidizing communism. “They’re taking our freedoms away!” he said.

“It all started with those commie-loving hippies with their so-called folk music,” he said. “Even country music has been infiltrated by hippies, like that bearded pot-smoker, Willie Nelson.”

In my mind I shuffled through the cassette tapes in the shoe-box under the front seat of my car, and noted Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Also there was “The Red-Headed Stranger” by Willie Nelson.

I visualized Robbie Burns with his beard and tie-dyed t-shirt, without a doubt a commie-loving hippie in the eyes of Mr. Bailey.

Later, I told KDV of my diverse experience that day.

“That’s Real Estate, babe,” said KDV. “Where else can you simultaneously be hangin’ with the hippies and workin’ for the man?”

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April 23, 2015

Nobody Home

Walking around in people’s houses when they aren’t home is an odd part of the Real Estate job. You witness some peculiar things.

I once saw a Basset Hound sprawled on the kitchen floor in front of an open refrigerator door surrounded by a great splatter of former contents of that refrigerator. Stained meat wrappers, mangled Tupperware containers, and various chunks, lumps, and hunks of foodstuff radiated from the snoring and bloated dog in a colorful collage like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Another time, I discovered a rat swimming frantically around in a toilet bowl, fighting for dear life. “Good riddance,” said Bill, my buyer. But I couldn’t leave that rat. Bill looked shocked when I scooped the little guy up with a plunger and flipped him outside. Hey, my kids owned pet rats named Fluffy and Scamper, and this was a cute one.

An odder part of the Real Estate job is walking around in people’s houses when you think they aren’t home, but they are. That oddity occurred three times over the course of a single weekend when I was showing houses to my client, Rosie.

First, in a workshop behind an old country farmhouse Rosie and I came upon an elderly man in overalls slumped over a dented metal desk, his head resting on his arms. I had dutifully yelled “REAL ESTATE!” when I opened the front door of the house; but not the shop. I coughed intentionally. The man jerked suddenly awake, alleviating our concerns that he might be dead, but the surprise appeared to nearly kill him anyway, for he clutched his chest and gasped, “Lordy, Lordy!”

At the next place, Rosie and I looked down from the second-story master bedroom window to the pool below, and beheld a man lying on his back, splayed out on a lounge chair, happily sunbathing in the nude. My front-door announcement had been unheard again. “Let’s get out of here,” whispered Rosie, and we slunk from the house anonymously, though I left a business card on the kitchen counter.

At the third place, we witnessed a lady strolling queen-like across her back yard. She held a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and wore a long shimmering silky robe. She might as well have been striding through the grounds of a castle, though her home was modest. Classical music flowed from a table-top radio, enhancing the elegance of the spectacle.

Back at the office, Rosie said, “I’m sold on that blissful place with the lovely lady in the back yard. Let’s make an offer.” She narrowed her eyes. “Did you stage all that just to get me to buy that last house?”

I didn’t, but it’s not a bad idea.

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March 19, 2015

The Shaft

“It’s grandfathered in,” said the Listing Agent.

I had called the agent on behalf of my clients, Jenny and Brad, who were writing an offer on her Listing.

“Is there a building permit for the Family Room addition built on to the back of the house?” I asked.

“My sellers say it’s been there forever.”

I passed the news on to Jenny and Brad that the Family Room addition had been “grandfathered in” and we left it at that.

Six months after we closed escrow on the house, Jenny and Brad filed for a building permit to add a bathroom to a section of the Family Room.

Brad called me. “We have a little problem with the house,” he said anxiously. “The Building Inspector who came to the house told us the Family Room is not “grandfathered in”.

The Building Inspector condemned the Family Room and served Jenny and Brad with a notice of Code violation.

When I related the situation to my mentor, KDV, he said, “Looks like you sold your people the gold mine, babe, but they got the shaft.”

I went to the Building Department and talked to the Chief Building Official.

The Chief frowned over the inspection notes and said, “The Inspector says here that the Family Room windows, light fixtures, and construction framing can’t possibly be over forty years old, which is the age it needs to be to qualify as ‘grandfathered in’; in other words, it wasn’t constructed before building permits were required, so it is illegal.”

The Chief told me that Jenny and Brad were required to submit a set of architectural plans and pay the fees to process the permit, but because Jenny and Brad didn’t cause the violation in the first place, the fees were less than they would be if the Family Room were being constructed new.

I hired an architect, we submitted the plans to the Building Department, and the Inspector came back for a one-time “Special Inspection”.

As it turned out, the Family Room was well-constructed and in compliance with Building Code, except for one thing: the walls were placed on the old original patio concrete slab with no perimeter foundation footings. The only solution was to dig trenches under the walls and pour a new concrete foundation two feet deep and one foot wide.

KDV stopped by the house and found me on my knees, shovel in hand, digging trenches.

“So you did sell your people a gold mine, babe,” he said “but you get to dig the shaft.”

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