Friday, July 3, 2026

The seller called while I was on vacation (my first vacation in eight months, three days in, hadn't even unpacked fully) to tell me the buyer's inspector found a crack in the foundation and now the buyer wants a $40,000 credit or they're walking, and I'm standing in the hotel lobby in flip-flops trying to explain that a hairline crack is not the same as structural failure while my broker is texting me that the listing photos show a water stain in the basement that I apparently missed during the initial walkthrough because I was too focused on staging the kitchen island with fake lemons, which the seller keeps bringing up like the lemons are somehow related to the foundation, and the inspector's report says "monitor for movement" which means nothing is actually wrong yet but the buyer's agent is using phrases like "material defect" and "disclosure obligations" and I had to google what our state actually requires while pretending I already knew, and the whole deal fell apart three days later over $12,000 because neither side would split the difference and I made exactly zero dollars on six weeks of work and my broker said "good learning experience" which is what people say when they mean you messed up but they're being polite about it.

The photos looked great. The stager did this whole mid-century modern thing with the walnut credenza and the Eames knockoff chairs and honestly it photographed like a dream, which is why I scheduled three showings back to back on Saturday morning without doing a walkthrough first (my fault, I know, I know) and the first couple walks in and there's a cat. Just sitting on the kitchen island. Not the seller's cat. Not a neighbor's cat. Nobody's cat. The stager had apparently left the sliding door open on Thursday to air out the paint smell and this cat just moved in, and when I say moved in I mean it had knocked over the $400 ceramic lamp, shattered it, peed in the decorative basket the stager brought, and here's the part that still makes me want to scream — it had been eating the fake fruit. Bite marks in the styrofoam pears. The couple asked if the cat conveyed with the property and I laughed like it was a joke but they weren't joking, and now I'm trying to figure out if I'm liable for the lamp or if the stager is or if we just pretend this never happened because the cat is still there, I checked this morning, it's still there.

The wire didn't arrive. Three hundred thousand dollars, sitting in some holding pattern at the bank because someone typed an extra digit in the routing number. Not even my mistake, the title company's mistake, but guess who the seller is calling every twenty minutes. Me. Because apparently I'm supposed to personally reach into the banking system and pull the money out. Meanwhile the lockbox is doing that thing where it just beeps and won't open. Battery's fine. Code's right. It just decided today was the day to stop working. Had a buyer standing there for forty minutes while I'm on hold with the lockbox company and they keep asking if I've tried the code again. Yes. Yes I have tried the code. Twelve times. And my CRM crashed this morning, which normally whatever, but it took my entire showing schedule with it. Just gone. Three weeks of appointments. The backup was from February. February. It's October. The support guy asked if I'd enabled auto-sync and I wanted to reach through the phone. The seller called again while I was typing this. Still no wire. She asked if I could call the bank directly and I said yes even though they won't talk to me because I'm not on the account. But sure. I'll call. I'll sit on hold for an hour and accomplish nothing because that's apparently my job now. The lockbox is still beeping. I can hear it from here.