By Living Room Realty, August 1, 2018
Laying lazily on my Grandmother’s couch in California, listening to Christmas music and smelling the roast in the oven, I hear my cell phone ring in the other room. Surely it’s someone wishing me happy holidays; it’s Christmas eve after all! I hear it ring again, and again, and again.. I saunter into the bedroom and see a series of missed calls from numbers I don’t recognize. Opening up the voicemails, I begin to hear the frantic voice of a neighbor, the next message from the Portland Police. Though my listing is a land/lot, there is an old home sitting on it that some squatters have made their winter’s den. They also decided that the cold weather warranted a bonfire inside that home. This evening would mark the beginning of several months of boarded up windows, fires in the garage and home, phallic spray paint, phone calls from the neighbor, changed locks, whiskey bottles, broken glass, and police calls. While my patient sellers wait, desperatly depending on me from across the country to sell the property.. The phone rings and I find myself cringing for what news would follow the too familiar “I’m standing outside your listing.. aaaaaaand….” (insert any of the most outlandish things a REALTOR® could ever hear about a listing- zombies walking the property again? More fires? The mailbox is melted again? My sign is kicked over for the fourth time?) “…And I’d like to make an offer.” Going from the most difficult listing of my career, to the smoothest transaction of my life- I give you Marie street! 1 full acre of head shakes, graffiti remover and eye rolls, we close the boarded up door on yet another chapter.
I want to extend my sincere gratitude to my sellers, who never once considered leaving my side nor questioned my ability. A true partnership is proven when things get down and dirty, and we all walk away respecting each other and grateful we were in it together.
