Haunted Houses Don't Always Look Like This One
I've looked at as well as listed thousands of homes throughout my long career as a Realtor.
So it's probably reasonable to assume that I have come across a lot of surprises.
A few years ago, I saw where a listing in a very desirable Dallas area had expired, and my investigation showed that the house had had several consecutive listing agents. Each of them had failed.
Me being me, I had to see for myself what in the world was the problem.
Why hadn't the house sold? It looked like it was priced fairly well, and the photos of inside and out looked OK.
I prospected the guy, and he invited me to come for a look-see.
Everything was going pretty well until we got to looking at the bedrooms. There were three. One was the master bedroom, the second was being used as his home office and the third was his wife's exercise/ballet studio, complete with a ballet bar and mirrors around the bottom half of the walls.
And then we started down the hall. There were three closets. In each, there was a single mattress on the floor, pictures on the wall, and other stuff. It turned out each of those was being used a child's bedroom.
We went into the den, and there were very obvious foundation problems.
So when we got ready to talk about why the house hadn't sold, I told him that he would have to get the kids' bedrooms out of the closets and the foundation repaired.
He said he didn't have enough money to repair the foundation, and his wife wasn't going to give up her exercise studio, and he wasn't going to give up his home office.
The kids, he said, loved their closet bedrooms.
I suggested to him that it was most likely that the general public was recoiling at the idea of children living in closets, and that leaving the foundation to be corrected by a buyer was also likely to reduce interest.
He told me that they had no plans to change anything. I said I wouldn't be able to help him sell his home.
Sunday, Patty and I happen to drive down that street at least four years after my visit. This time there was a worn-out cardboard FSBO sign in the yard. I checked the tax rolls, and the guy and his wife still owned the house.
Inside were the ghosts of Realtors' past. Mine wasn't one of them.
BILL CHERRY, REALTOR
Since 1966
Dallas
214 503-8563
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