An article in a Toronto newspaper caused quite a stir on the radio waves a couple of days ago.
Apparently, a real estate agent in Toronto listed a house, proceeded to stage it, paint it, and clean it up. The owners had bought the house only months ago and then decided to separate/divorce.
The house was on the market for several months and two ten thousand price reductions followed
Finally, they got an offer for $428,000, countered to $460,000 and when the buyer finally signed that counter, after expiry of irrevocability date, they decided to take their house off the market, realizing they would be taking a significant loss if they sold at that price , which IMHO is everyone’s prerogative.
The agent turned around and sued them for about three thousand, for the physical work of staging and painting. She felt they had no real intention to sell but were rather testing the market to see what the buy out for one of them would be.
They finally settled out of court for about $1,600.
I went on the newspaper site (the StarI I believe) and browsed the reader comments; some of them pretty nasty about real estate agents, some saying that that is just the cost of doing business and some agreeing with the agent.
Something similar happened to me, some years ago, I had lugged furniture to an overpriced listing, the only thing had in writing was the sellers’ signature by my market evaluation pegging the price at twenty thousand below the price they insisted on listing at.
Some months and a lot of anxiety later the listing expired and they did not want to re list with me. Yup, I rented another truck and lugged all my furniture home and learned a big fat lesson.
The house sold for exactly what I said it would sell for, a year and four agents later.
The good news is that the same sellers called me later to sell something else.
This time at market value. my terms and no staging.
http://www.thestar.com/article/1100849
Comments(4)