Going outside the box to close the deal

First... in order to protect the privacy of those involved I'm changing the names of the players and places in this story.  It has some very personal and painful information, but I'd like to share it because I'd like my buyers and sellers to know at what lengths I go through from time to time in order to help them.  And that sometimes the pain of others becomes personally heartbreaking for me because I tend to truly get involved with my clients and care about their feelings as well as closing the deal.

So we had this little lady, Jessie, come to our office to sell a home.  It was not her home, but that of her late "companion", I'll call him Jim.  Her dear departed companion had died and she was very emotional.  She was the executrix of his will and had the right to sell the house.  But the fact was all the proceeds of his estate were going to pay doctor bills and hospital bills due to his length illness.  The house was on the market and a young couple, newly weds, fell in love with it. 

So when the title work was done the attorney phoned me to tell me the probate wasn't done to the satisfaction of due diligence and would have to be done again.  The problem was that it had a conflict.  It said the decedents daughter was unable to be located and two lines below that was an address for her.  There were no records of attempted service notification therefore we had to have a do over which can be lengthy.  The young couple was totally freaking out that they were not going to get to buy this house.

So I called the little lady and she said she didn't know where the daughter was but perhaps Jim's brother Johnny would know where his niece was living.  She gave me Johnny's phone number and I passed that information on to the attorney.  Well in half an hour the news got WORSE.  When the attorney asked Tom did he know where Joe's daughter was living the reply was "which one?"  Ummm, what do you mean which one? 

And so the story unfolded about Joe's first marriage and daughter and divorce and estrangement. So now we had not one, but two daughters we had to have served in order to probate the will or at least prove we did due diligent searches in order to located.  So I picked up the phone and called Johnny and asked him to give me all the information he had.  There wasn't much.  But apparently wife #1's father paid Joe to go away and never come back when daughter #1 was just an infant.  I had the wife's name, the daughter's name (Maggie) and the city of birth which happened to be in Mississippi.  I called Jackson for birth records and found the date of birth (Uncle Johnny did not know the exact date) only the mother's maiden name and city of birth.  My next step in locating a woman .... (imagine me squeezing eyes shut and thinking really hard).

Meanwhile back a the ranch daughter #2 had been located and served.  So I phoned the chamber of commerce in Booneville Mississippi and asked them to send me all the "Clarks" in the phone book.  And if any of you are wondering this was before Google or Whitepages.com existed.  Thus... they faxed me photo copied pages from the phone book and I started making calls looking for Maggie.  Well after about 20 calls on day number two I had a lead.  They would not give me the information I was seeking until I gave them the story.  Then they gave me Maggie's work number.  She actually lived in Georgia and they would not give me her home number, but only her work number.

So I sat there and debated just how I was going to proceed when I called a woman in her late 40s to tell her that a father she had never known had died, had not mentioned her at all in is will, and needed her address so she could be served with probate papers.  Needless to say I was just a little sick to my stomach.  I could have gotten the attorney to make that call, but I put myself in her shoes and sucked up my feeling and decided I would be more personal, and more compassionate than the attorney calling.

So I made that call and we both cried.  I told her about her dad's last years with the companion that was selling his home and that he'd been sick for a long time and that all the funds from the sale would be going to pay medical bills.  She asked if perhaps she could talk to her late father's companion, Jessie, and I said I would give Jessie her number.  I got her address and gave that information to the attorney.  She was served and the second probate came to an end and the deal closed and the young couple got their house.

A few weeks later in the mail arrived to me a lovely note from Maggie.  She'd driven over and spent a day with Jessie and talked about her father, shared time with someone and seen photos of a father she'd never known.  In the note she said she was so happy to have found that her father had straightened out his life and found love and happiness.  She was filled with joy to discover a sister and what she viewed as sad news that day actually had made her life better.  And she thanked me for the compassion in tone and words I used when I made that call. 

I don't really know what made me think to start calling every person in that little town with her mother's maiden name, but at the time it must have seemed like the most logical thing to do.  I do remember that my attorney said to me that day "if you ever get tired of selling real estate, you should hang a private eye shingle."  I thank Sue Grafton, Mary Higgins Clark, Catherine Coulter, Kathy Reichs, Sidney Sheldon, J.D. Robb and James Patterson.  Reading mysteries and crime solving fiction has certainly made me a wiser woman.  And that was a long time ago, but after 20 years in this business I am still as dedicated and excited about real estate as the day I started.  And I give my clients that same level of service today too.