Tuesday, April 14, 2026

The second showing was supposed to be quick. Monday 2pm: Meet buyers at 412 Maple for second look. They love it. Ready to write offer. Monday 2:47pm: Buyers pointing at backyard fence, asking about the shed. There is no shed in listing photos. Monday 2:52pm: Check listing sheet. 412 Maple. Check house number on door. 421 Maple. Monday 2:53pm: We are in wrong house. Have been in wrong house for 50 minutes. Monday 2:54pm: Front door opens. Actual homeowner standing there with groceries. Monday 3:15pm: Homeowner not pressing charges because quote nothing is missing and you seem really upset. Monday 4pm: Buyers still want to make offer. On 421. Which is not for sale. Monday 6pm: Called listing agent for 412. She laughed for maybe 30 seconds straight. Tuesday: Buyers found something else. Door was unlocked, that's the thing. Who leaves their door unlocked. That's really the part I keep.

The final walkthrough was routine. Buyer's there, I'm there, everything looks good, we're fifteen minutes from closing. Then she opens the hall closet and there's like eight bags of trash in there. Not small bags. Kitchen bags, full, tied up. The seller just left them. In the closet. Like we wouldn't look in the closet. And the thing is, I called the listing agent and she goes "well the contract says broom clean" and I'm like yeah, broom clean means you don't leave garbage in the house. She says "technically the floors are clean." Technically. We went back and forth for twenty minutes about whether stuffing trash in a closet counts as broom clean. Real estate school, they teach you about contracts and disclosures and how to calculate square footage. Nobody tells you that you're going to argue about trash bags at 10am on a Tuesday while your buyer is crying in the driveway because she thinks the whole deal is falling apart. Over trash. Eight bags of trash. The seller wanted a hundred dollar credit. A hundred dollars. The buyer wanted the seller to come back and remove them personally. Which was never going to happen because the seller was already on a plane to Phoenix. My broker had to get involved. We settled on two hundred dollars and I carried the bags out myself. In my good shoes. The ones that cost more than the credit. Nobody prepared me for this part. The part where you're a garbage man in heels.

The second showing was supposed to be quick. In and out, couple already loved it from photos, just needed to walk through before making an offer, and the staging company had set everything up two days before so I didn't even check it that morning (my fault, I know, I know) but when we walked in the entire living room smelled like cat and there's this massive orange tabby just sitting on the staged couch like he owned the place which technically I guess he did because turns out the seller had been coming back to feed him even though she'd moved out and the cat had apparently been using the $1,200 rental rug as a litter box for those two days and the buyers just stood there while this cat meowed at them and the wife said "is this included" and I genuinely couldn't tell if she was joking and the husband was already walking back to his car and the staging company charged me $800 for the rug damage because it was "my showing, my responsibility" and the seller acted like I was being unreasonable when I asked her to stop coming by and she said "he gets lonely" about the cat, about the cat that cost me this sale and also $800 and also my entire Saturday because I had to find a carpet cleaner open on short notice and pay rush fees and the couple bought something else two weeks later, not even through me.