Capacitus Interruptus
Dear readers, a brief break from the navel-gazing for some flat-out whining and bitching, completely unrelated.
Living in Small City lends itself to a lot of social networking, which we have done. What social netowrking leads to is a whole lot of wonderful things, but a few bad things, too. Primarily, we tend to know friends who, say, can do our electrical work, painting, babysitting, and sell our house. Remember that our painter-friend left our front door wiiiide open when he finished in our house. grrr.
Our realtor is an aquaintance I knew from the Bicycle club (back when I had that luxury). Real nice guy. Motivated. Sharp as a red rubber ball.
We have a hard time communicating with him. By e-mail, he doesn't read our e-mails carefully, and gets many things wrong. For example, today our MLS (Multi-listing service- the standardized nationwide document advertising our home for sale) went up and there were some errors. We wrote him to amend the errors and he mis-read the e-mail to think we were referring to a different ad we put up in the local paper. The MLS blurb he wrote had run-on sentences and misspellings and flat-out errors. He listed that our basement is heated. It is not, and he knew that since he suggested we throw in some baseboard heating to make it more saleable.
Moreover, it is hard to talk to him face-to-face. What I want is someone who will do their due diligence, advise me on the questions I am asking and not the ones I am not. I say "I" because its mostly me dealing with him in person. What I get is a guy who likes to tell stories about his other clients in fairly similar situations, and try to "comfort" me. I don't need your comfort. I want your information and experience. I'm just fine, thank you.
If doing all the work ourselves including researching the market, finding houses we are interested in, asking friends and neighbors for their thoughts, and just using a realtor for their key to showings is a one (1), and completely trusting the realtor to attend to every detail, having a very hands-off approach is a ten (10), we are sitting at about a 3 right now. Is that worth the approxiamtely $6000 we will end up paying this guy? Not feeling it.
Last time I met him, I had to leave work at a critical juncture in an experiement to get him his folder on our account that he had left behind in our house. At this time, I wrote a list of homes we wanted to see and information we wanted to know about building a new home, such as cost, acquiring land, how to find appropriate plans, codes, fincncing, etc. My thought: Here, set up showings of these listings and find out what we need to know about building and get back to me. Later that day, he sent me the web MLS listings of the homes we wanted to see. Of course I have those, dearie, how do you think I found the listings in the first place?
But things haven't reached the threshhold where its bad enough to fire him, friend or not. The threshhold is even higher because he is a friend, so things will have to get EVEN worse if we are to let him go.
Yikes, that is so frustrating! What makes it worse, I'm sure, is that you would have already fired him if he weren't a friend.
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