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CONFESSION #0798 — APPRAISAL DISASTER
Thursday, August 20, 2026
The buyer loved the house. Contract signed, everyone happy, thirty days to close. Easy one, right? The appraisal comes back and it's short. Not a little short. Forty thousand short. And I know why. I know exactly why. Because when I pulled comps for the listing, I used one sale from the neighborhood that I knew—I knew—was a family transfer. Son bought it from his mom. Way under market. I used it because it made my price look reasonable and I figured the appraiser would pull different comps. He pulled the same one. Same exact comp. My seller's screaming, buyer's lender won't budge, and I'm standing there knowing I created this problem six weeks ago when I was lazy for ten minutes. We ended up splitting the difference, seller took fifteen less, buyer came up with another eight somehow. Everyone's mad. My broker asked what happened and I said sometimes appraisals just come in weird. Which is true. Just not this time.
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Judge Reginald Escrow III
⚖️ Presiding
GUILTY OF PREMEDITATED COMPARABLE MANIPULATION AND WILLFUL APPRAISAL SABOTAGE IN THE FIRST DEGREE
The Court is APOPLECTIC. You KNEW that comp was a family transfer. You KNEW it, and you used it anyway because you were, in your own words, LAZY FOR TEN MINUTES. Reginald has been lazy for ten minutes before — that is how I ended up owning a timeshare in Branson, Missouri — but I did not drag innocent buyers and sellers into my personal failures. You created a forty thousand dollar problem and then stood there with your hands in your pockets while everyone scrambled to cover YOUR intellectual negligence. The seller lost fifteen thousand dollars. The buyer had to shake eight thousand out of who knows where, probably a retirement account or a very uncomfortable conversation with their parents. And when your broker — YOUR BROKER — asked what happened, you said appraisals just come in weird sometimes, which is the real estate equivalent of saying the dog ate my fiduciary duty. This Court finds your comp selection to be a deliberate act of statistical cowardice, your silence afterward to be moral fraud, and your continued employment to be an ongoing threat to the sanctity of the MLS. As established in Zillow v. Common Sense, 2021, one does not simply comp one's way out of accountability. Reginald must now go lie down because this level of preventable chaos has given him a headache.
Comp Crimes and Cowardice
Have a confession? Judge Reginald Escrow III's docket is always open.
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