Friday, April 3, 2026

The other agent emailed at 9pm. Friday night, says her clients want to see it tomorrow at 11 which is fine except I already have an open house scheduled noon to 3 so I figure okay I'll just come early and let them in before and that was my first mistake because I get there at 10:45 and there's already a car in the driveway and it's not the buyers it's the seller who was supposed to be in Tucson visiting her sister but apparently the sister got shingles (the disease not the roofing material though honestly either would've been less of a problem) so she came back early and she's inside baking something and the whole house smells like fish which turns out to be some kind of salmon loaf her mother used to make and she's crying about her mother while the buyers are walking through and the wife keeps making this face every time she breathes in and the husband asks if there's a septic issue and I have to explain no that's just salmon and then the seller comes out of the kitchen still crying and tries to offer them a slice and they left in under 8 minutes and the feedback form just said "odor concerns" which like yes technically accurate but really undersells what happened there

The buyers walked after the inspection. Not because of the inspection, because of the staging. The stager I hired, she's done like 50 houses for me, she's good, she knows what she's doing. But this time she brings in this enormous sectional for the living room. And I mean enormous. Thing was maybe 12 feet across? In a room that's maybe 14 by 16. You could barely walk around it. But that's not why they walked. She also brought plants. Real ones, not fake, which I didn't ask for and didn't want. One of them, this ficus or whatever, she put it in the corner by the window in the primary bedroom. The pot had a crack in it apparently. Nobody noticed. Water leaked out onto the hardwood for three weeks. Three weeks. By the time the buyers came through for their second showing, there's this warped discolored patch maybe two feet across, right there, impossible to miss. The seller calls me screaming about the floor. Eight hundred dollars to refinish, minimum, probably more because they have to blend it. The stager says it's not her fault because the pot was fine when she brought it in. The seller wants me to pay. I'm not paying. The stager's not paying. Everyone's mad at me specifically. And the buyers, they didn't even mention the floor in their withdrawal letter. They said the house felt cramped. Because of the sectional. That I told her was too big. That she said would make the room feel cozy.

The inspection came back clean. That's what kills me. We were good to go, buyer was happy, seller was happy, everyone's signing in three days. Then my seller calls me and says she wants to replace the kitchen faucet before closing. Not because anything's wrong with it. Because she saw one she liked better at Home Depot and thought it would be a nice gesture. Should have said no. Should have said we're not touching anything, we're locked in, leave it alone. But she seemed so sincere about it and I figured what's the harm. Her brother-in-law does the install. Cracks something under the sink. Now there's water damage to the cabinet base, and the buyer's inspector comes back for the final walkthrough and catches it. Wanted a $4,000 credit. We settled at $2,500. She asked me afterward if she should have just left it alone. Like I wasn't going to say yes. Like that wasn't obvious from the beginning.