Monday, May 4, 2026

Closing was at 2pm. The buyers were already there, the title company had everything ready, and my seller calls me panicking because she left a whole storage unit worth of stuff in the garage. Not boxes. Furniture. A treadmill. One of those massive chest freezers that weighs like 400 pounds. She was supposed to clear it out the week before and just... didn't. Kept saying she'd get to it. The contract was clear, property delivered empty, and here we are three hours before close with what looks like a yard sale in there. I should have verified. That's my job. I drove by the day before and didn't even open the garage door because she told me it was handled. Just took her word. The buyers wanted a $2,000 credit to haul everything themselves. My seller argued for twenty minutes about how the freezer alone was worth $800 like that was relevant. Like they wanted her freezer. We settled at $1,500 and everyone was mad at me specifically, which honestly, fair.

The buyers walked after the inspection. Not because of the inspection, because of the staging. The stager brought in this enormous sectional, I mean really beautiful piece, probably twelve thousand dollars, and it completely hid the water damage on the baseboard behind it. Which I didn't know about. Which the sellers definitely knew about. So the buyers are doing their walkthrough with the inspector, he moves a cushion to check an outlet, and there's this black mold creeping up the wall like it's been there for years. Because it has been there for years. The sellers acted shocked. Actually said the words "we had no idea" while standing in their own house. The buyers' agent called me a liar in the driveway, not yelling, just calm, which was worse. I had to explain to my broker why we lost a four hundred thousand dollar sale over furniture placement. The stager wants her sectional back.

We were three days from closing. Three days. The buyers had done their final walkthrough, everyone signed off, title company had everything queued up. My commission check was going to be around twelve thousand after the split, and I had already mentally spent about eight of it because my car needed new brakes and I was two months behind on my health insurance. Then the listing agent calls me. Not texts, calls. Which you know is never good. The seller decided to take the chandelier. The chandelier that was in the dining room during every single showing. The chandelier that was explicitly listed as a fixture in the contract. She just... took it. Put up some brushed nickel thing from Home Depot and acted like nobody would notice. My buyers noticed. They wanted a ten thousand dollar credit. The seller offered two hundred. Two. Hundred. Dollars. For a chandelier her grandmother brought over from Italy in 1962 or whatever, I don't know, she kept telling me the story like it mattered. Lady, I don't care if your grandmother hand-carried it across the Atlantic on her back, it was in the contract. We went back and forth for six days. Six days past closing. The buyers almost walked. The seller's agent stopped returning my calls on day four, just texting me "working on it" every few hours. Final credit was eighteen hundred. My commission got docked for the extension fees. The whole thing cost me probably four hundred bucks and I genuinely cannot look at chandeliers anymore without feeling my blood pressure spike.