The Evil Realtor

Tonight, I was going to blather about random odd thoughts in life, such when you're driving down the road with no one behind you for miles, and some yahoo waits until you are almost up to them before they pull into the road and force you to slam on your brakes to avoid hitting them. (Good thing there was no one behind you for miles, eh?) However, I feel a rant coming on instead.

I know I should not give other people power over me. Intellectually, I know that I am capable of refusing to let someone have control over my thoughts, feelings, and emotions. However, I am sitting here in my self-imposed funk, and stewing over an evil realtor who happens to work for the same company as our realtor.

Our Realtor is a very nice, gentle, laid-back kind of elderly gentleman. Evil Realtor is an aggressive, both passively and actively, shrew of a not-quite-as-elderly lady. (I'm using the term 'lady' loosely, mostly because what I'd like to call her would not keep this as a G-rated rant.) Over the course of the past five months we have had our house on the market, we kept having bizarre, tangentially-related run-ins with Evil Realtor, through Our Realtor.

First of all, we chose Our Realtor because we liked his style. He had been with us when we bought this house, and he always seemed to appreciate the quality that went into this building. He also does not have very many houses listed at any given point in time, which we thought was a plus since it meant he could have more time to concentrate on selling our house. We deliberately did not want Evil Realtor. We had heard too many things about her aggressive nature and we decided we wanted nothing to do with her, under any circumstances.

Silly us. The first thing that happened was that Our Realtor sought out Evil Realtor's advice on an acceptable list price for our house. He then showed us a list of housing prices in our area, quoted us the price, and made us question his logic for suggesting a price far less than the average price for comparable housing. He claimed it was Evil Realtor's suggestion, and he was trusting her to really know our town. Wrong answer, buddy. My husband talked him into a list price a bit higher than the one Evil Realtor suggested, but still less than others in town.

The next run-in was during our first Open House. Evil Realtor was having an Open House the same day and just a few doors up the street from us. Our Realtor sent the people who showed up to our house up to Evil Realtor's house when they were done here. Evil Realtor claims she reciprocated for us, yet none of those people managed to find our house. Neither my husband nor myself believe she actually sent those prospective buyers our way.

Evil Realtor told Our Realtor that she was going to show someone our house a week or two ago, but chose to show a different house instead because the taxes were a few hundred dollars a year cheaper. Our town has not been re-evaluated in decades, and I can pretty much guarantee that those few hundred dollars were because their house was probably built fifty years before ours. Personally, I'd rather have the newer house with the slightly higher taxes, but that was still a pretty flimsy excuse for not showing a house. Aren't realtors supposed to show people a whole bunch of houses so that people can find the perfect one for their situation? This is not an either this house or that one thing. Both houses could have been shown to that prospective buyer.

Tonight's run-in was when my husband searched online to see what kind of advertising and whatnot was in place for our Open House this weekend. He discovered a new listing, under Evil Realtor's name, that was a comparable house to what we own, yet was priced a whopping two hundred dollars less than us. This made us realize that Evil Realtor had given Our Realtor an insultingly low list price, and she must have known it if she listed barely under the price we finally chose.

The worst part of all of this is that Our Realtor still thinks Evil Realtor is looking out for him. He is sadly mistaken, and we're the ones getting hit in the crossfire.

So for right now, we'll deal with having one last Open House before our contract expires. Then we'll pull our house off the market and search around for an aggressive realtor from another company. No more laid-back, walk-all-over-them kind of person, no sirree. We need someone with enough gumption to enter Evil Realtor's domain and take that nasty woman down. Getting our house sold for a reasonable price wouldn't hurt either.