Fired!

We fired our real estate agent yesterday. Just wasn’t working out.

Call me crazy, but if I tell you that I want to put my house on the market in a week, you better be involved in making sure that happens. You better have a plan. You better give me a call to make sure we’re gonna make the deadline, or offer to mow the lawn, or show me a copy of the flier you plan on distributing, or just fucking say hello, OR SOMETHING. I should be able to look at you and say, “Damn, I can’t believe you’re doing all this work and we’re only paying you 6% of the selling price! YOU ROCK!”

But this is not what happened. In fact it’s not even remotely close to what happened. So it was time to move in a different direction. This agent was referred to us from the guy who helped us sell our old trailer and moved us into this new one. Mark is an excellent agent and an old friend from my movie days, and anyone thinking of buying or moving in Seattle should look him up and use him. The company he works for has an agent referral service, which he used, and that’s how we wound up working with the agents I just fired.

Sweetie called Mark to tell him the news of our agents demise, and he told her this was the second time he’d been burned on an in-house agent referral. So he recommended a person not in his company whom he liked and used to work for and last night we met her son, as she only works as a broker these days. He seemed nice enough, but we’re not so naive as to take the first agent to come round the trailer these days. Corlis gave us the name of the agent his mom used to sell her condo and so Sweetie and I are meeting her tomorrow morning.

I think the other issue that decided this woman’s fate was the conversation we had regarding Sweetie’s and my marital status. Now this comes up from time to time, since Sweetie decided to keep her maiden name and usually it’s no big deal. She asked if we were married, I said we were--should be end of the story right? Well the next day we’re sitting around the dinning room table with her, going over some papers for an offer we were thinking of making on a house, and she’s left the last name off of Sweeties paperwork. Then she launches into this “you know, I have to ask, are you married.” Like we hadn’t even had this very same conversation just the day before. I thought it a little strange, but it didn’t end there. Last night after Sweetie got off the phone with Mark, she says, “You wont believe this… Mark said that HE had the exact same conversation with her, when he gave her the referral!”

I’m not sure if she was starting to loose her memory, or if she just had a lot of difficulty wrapping her head around the fact that people can get married AND have different last names.

There were other issues as well, issues about what needed to happen around the trailer to get it ready to sell. After we bought the new house, it became painfully obvious that the things that she was interested in us doing to prep the house, were not the deciding factors for me when I was looking and buying our new house. In fact they were inconsequential and if the buyers of the trailer want me to do them, I would be surprised.

This weekend Sweetie and I busted our butts getting the trailer ready to be put on the market. Rented a door-to-door storage unit to put the excess boxes of clutter in, and made a huge pile of garbage for the city to come and pick up. Goodwill is also making a killing off of us this spring, as we’ve decided that instead of a garage sale, we’re donating all the things we don’t want to move into our new house.

I think we’re hoping that all this donation karma might pay off—that maybe in some way it’ll work as a blessing upon this new house.

I don’t want to say that our old trailer was cursed or anything, but we moved in the week before Ike was born, and in any of you have gone back through the archives of this web site, it’s pretty clear that the single wide has a penchant for sending it’s inhabitants to the hospital on a semi-regular basis.

Here, I hope you’ll all pause for a minute and join me in a toast. (Yes I can wait for you to get your glass…go ahead. Ready?)

Here’s to hoping the new house has a penchant for getting its owners to sip Margaritas in their hot tub under a clear and starlit sky—to sit in peace and quiet on a warm summer evening—and to find a way to make those Saturday mornings in bed, last just a little bit longer.

Cheers


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