Love's Real Stories

Muted Market

“Man, the Stock Market has been going up and down like a yo-yo,” said my friend JP. “It makes my blood pressure go straight up.”

JP poured his fourth cup of coffee. His hand shook as he pointed at me and said, “We’ll see the Real Estate market go down, too. My blood pressure is going up as we speak.” He lifted his coffee cup and gulped.

“You think it might be because of all that coffee?” I asked.

“No. Coffee futures are pretty stable. It’s the big corporate stocks taking down the market.”

I called my friend the Finance Guy and put the phone on “speakerphone” so JP could listen in.

“Will the Real Estate market be affected by the Stock Market?” I asked.

“Traditionally, the fibrillation frequencies in housing do not synchronize with the radical fluctuations seen in commodities,” said the Finance Guy. “The obligation elements inherent in the purchase and maintenance of real property discourage extreme speculative behavior such as one might witness inside the hallowed confines of the Stock Exchange.”

“Huh?” said JP. I pushed the “mute” button to screen out JP’s comments.

“However,” continued the Finance Guy, “at times, Real Estate markets do go through periods of irrational exuberance, wherein price points may indeed display such aforementioned fluctuations.”

JP rolled his eyes.

I said to JP, “The phone is on ‘mute’ so you can talk.”

“Good,” said JP. “This guy’s a real egg-head.”

“I heard that,” said the Finance Guy.

“Oops.” I pushed the ‘mute’ button again.

The Finance Guy went on. “Considering the binary nature of investments with Real Estate and stocks we find a certain commonality in cause and effect.”

JP leaned back, closed his eyes, and patted his mouth with the palm of his hand, as if stifling a yawn.

On went the Finance Guy. “Your question, I assume, is promulgated by the current Stock Market fluctuations. The winter downturn was caused in part by storms, snow, and ice that stalled economic activity, affecting the Stock Market, and in turn Real Estate, but I assure you, for the very short term.”

“What did he say?” said JP.

“I think he said the Real Estate market and Stock Market are affected by the weather,” I said.

“Just what I need,” said JP, “an egg-head weatherman.”

“I heard that.”

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May 2, 2014

Real Short

“People have been going through hard times and I feel kind of guilty that we lucked out,” said Jena Scott. “The house we bought just a year and a half ago for $180,000 is now worth $260,000. Our Realtor says he hasn’t seen anyone else come out so far ahead so quickly.”

Jena shrugged her shoulders. “We just got so lucky,” she said.

It wasn’t all luck. Ron and Linda Jameson, the sellers of the house, were going through hard times. “I was down so long it looked like up to me,” said Ron Jameson. Ron is a building contractor and was hit hard by the economic crash.

“We bought when the market was swinging and my business was rolling, he said. “I put a bunch of remodel work into that house right outta the chute, but everything dumped right after,” he said.

Ron and Linda were selling via a short sale and would receive nothing from the sale, no matter who bought it or how much they paid. So, they could choose their buyer. They chose Jena and Jack.

“We chose the Scotts because we liked them,” said Linda. “We passed up an all-cash buyer who would have been more of a slam-dunk, but we wanted to give the Scotts a chance though they were first-time buyers with the possibility of loan difficulties.”

As it turned out, there was loan difficulty. The appraiser for the Scott’s lender turned in a low appraisal, $20,000 less than the sales price. The appraiser wouldn’t give value to Ron’s unfinished remodel work.

“It was all good work,” said Ron, “but I ran out of money and time before I reached the finish line.”

A low appraisal, especially $20,000 low, is typically a death blow to a sale. Banks won’t usually approve a short sale at that kind of discount. Cash buyers were on the sidelines waiting to jump in when this sale died, but the bank ignored common sense and didn’t look at any other offers.

“Through some kind of glitch in the red-tape process, the short sale was approved. Real short,” said Jack Scott.

The Jamesons were okay with it because they got nothing anyway. “We were just glad to have our loan debt forgiven,” said Linda Jameson.

“We bought way below value,” said Jena Scott, shrugging her shoulders. I’m so glad the Jamesons were our sellers.

That’s lucky.

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May 1, 2014

Crawl of the Wild

“I’m a traveling library of smells,” says Jim, the Whole House Inspector. He raises his arms and scans himself as if taking inventory. He’s explaining why vicious dogs, nasty cats, and a variety of vermin seem to tolerate him, even like him. That’s a good thing, because Jim is a trespasser on the turf of dogs, cats, and vermin in the course of doing his job.

Jim has been inspecting homes since 1985. He has crawled over, under, around and through thousands of them. He’s been face-to-face with snarling, hissing, snapping creatures, in basements, attics, and yards. He’s emerged, so far, with no bites, scratches, nor stings.

He’s been scared just once.

Jim crawled in darkness, in the dirt beneath a vacant house in the foothills. He used his flashlight like a duster, wrapping up spider webs in front of his face as he wriggled on his belly. He snaked his way around to the back of the area, and on his return saw the silhouette of a dog lying in the dirt to the right of the access opening.

He called out. No response. He crawled a little closer, and said calmly, “I’m supposed to be here,” his standard offer of diplomacy to all creatures he encounters on the job. The dog didn’t flinch. Jim bounced a dirt clod near the head, and then bounced one off the flank. No movement. “That’s a fight or flight situation once I hit him, so I knew something wasn’t right,” says Jim. He fixed his flashlight beam on the body and squirmed closer. Jim’s scalp tightened when he realized he was inches from a mountain lion, not a dog.

“He was dead, but hadn’t been for long. He wasn’t stiff,” says Jim. “I had been there to inspect that house a week earlier, but the utilities were off, so I left. It turns out the Realtor put the cover on the access opening a few days before that, and must have sealed that lion in. It was a terrible tragedy. But if I had made the crawl the first time, that lion would probably have been alive, hungry, and mad……”

Jim shuddered. “That’s scary.”

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April 18, 2014

Assuming

I assumed the man at the back of the property was a hired caretaker. I would soon find out I assumed wrong. He wore overalls and stood in front of a tall weather-worn wooden barn with a steep-sloped roof. He hammered on a long piece of metal between a pair of sawhorses. The man and his work were dwarfed by the big old barn and the barn was dwarfed by a group of giant oak and sycamore trees. Though the sun was high in the sky and it was a bright spring day, only mottled spots of sunshine reached barn and the ground through the canopy of the trees.

I was there to meet a lady I had talked to on the phone the previous day. She told me she had inherited the property from her mother, and was thinking of selling. She told me her mother had passed away a year ago and the place was looked after by a caretaker. I assumed she was the sole heir and she alone was in charge of selling the property. I would soon find out I assumed wrong.

The property was a unique and rare beauty, five acres within the main boundaries of town, bordered on one side by a wild stretch of creek. The surrounding area had been subdivided into neighborhoods and built up years before. This five acre piece was the holdout. The mother had refused buyers’ offers year after year, vowing to raise her kids and live her life out on the property, which she did.

I had parked on the street and walked past the old Craftsman-style family home, and proceeded back toward the barn.

“Morning,” I called to the man at the barn. I told him I was there to meet the owner of the property and discuss selling the property.

“Gonna meet the owner, huh?” he said. “Nice piece of property here. You Real Estate?”

I told him yes, I was “Real Estate” and asked if he took care of the place.

“Oh, I do my part from time to time.” He knew I had misjudged him, and he kept it that way.

“Place like this should go to a family,” he said. “These folks have been here over a hundred years.”

I told him I agreed, and that it would be a shame to see it changed, but unfortunately the most likely buyer was a developer, because of the property’s extremely high value as development ground.

“An appraiser would say,” I told him, “that developing the property would be its ‘highest and best use’.”

“I hate words like ‘highest and best use’,” he said. “Besides, I wouldn’t talk about selling a place like this on a fine day like today.”

A fine day it was. The creek sparkled in the spring sunshine and blue and white flowers waved in the creekside breezes.

“I see you’ve met my brother.” It was the lady I had talked to on the phone. “Our mother left the property to both of us, so my brother will be involved in any talk of selling.”

So the man was the lady’s brother, not the caretaker, and the lady was not the sole heir.

I looked at the brother and he said nothing but shook his head slightly.

I harkened back to the words of my old mentor, KDV: “Never assume. You know what happens you assume?” I knew.

I told the lady, “I don’t think your brother wants to talk to me about selling.”

That time I assumed right.

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April 17, 2014

Tricky Houses

Realtors have learned the hard way that houses will often misbehave when their owners are away. Houses will trick the Realtor, test the Realtor, and employ various pranks designed to cause insult and injury. One of the oldest tricks is the self-locking door. The Realtor accompanies his clients out the back door for a look-see at the back yard, and the back door slams shut from the inside, locked tight. Houses generally use the self-locking back door trick only when the Realtor has already left the key to the house (along with the Realtor’s car keys) on the kitchen counter and locked the front door after entering.

The three-legged barbeque is a great tool for a house prank. The mere accidental tap of a Realtor’s shoe will knock the leg of a barbeque off-kilter far enough to send the whole apparatus crashing to the ground like a fallen tree. The noise of the crashing barbeque is unnerving, and the resulting toxic mess of ash, old briquettes and grill-grease strewn across the patio is horrifying. Houses generally use the three-legged barbeque trick only when the Realtor has already left the key to the house on the kitchen counter and is trapped outside via the self-locking back door trick.

Decks are a playground of prank possibilities for houses. Potted plants, rotten deck boards, and loose deck rails have all been used to great effect. In fact, I have seen all three of those possibilities used at the same time. The Realtor trips over the potted plant with his left foot, drives his right foot through a couple of rotten deck boards, and grabs the loose deck rail to break his fall, pulling the deck rail down around his head and shoulders. His clients fuss over him to his great embarrassment, adding insult to his injuries.

Of course, the Realtor tripped over the potted plant in the first place because he was preoccupied, searching for windows that may have been unlocked, because he had left the key to the house on the kitchen counter, and was trapped outside via the self-locking back door trick, not to mention victimized by the three-legged barbecue trick.

Despite the insults and injuries the Realtor may suffer from misbehaving houses, he learns valuable life lessons from the experiences, such as how to maintain a professional demeanor while confronted with his clients’ efforts to distance themselves from his proximity, not to mention how to repair deck boards and deck rails, and scrub grill-grease off of a concrete patio.

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