Monday, August 24, 2026

The commission check was short. Not like a little short, like twelve thousand dollars short. Brokerage said it was a clerical error but also maybe I owed them from a deal that fell through in March? Nobody could explain which deal or why I would owe anything. Three emails, two phone calls, everyone's pointing at someone else's department. Meanwhile my buyer from that same transaction calls me crying because the sellers left behind a chest freezer in the garage. Full. Unplugged for six weeks. She wanted me to come deal with it personally and I'm sitting here looking at a commission statement that doesn't add up while this woman describes the smell to me in detail. Genuine detail. She's gagging between sentences. Twelve thousand dollars and a freezer full of meat. That was Tuesday.

We lost the earnest money dispute. Eight thousand dollars, gone, and honestly it's my fault because I should have put my foot down about the inspection repairs. The seller agreed to fix the water heater, right, that was in the addendum, signed, done. Then three days before closing she calls me and says actually her handyman looked at it and said it's fine, she's not replacing it anymore. I told her that's not how this works, you signed a legal document. She said well the buyers can take it or leave it. Here's where I messed up. I told the buyers to just close and deal with it later because I was so tired of this woman, she'd already changed the closing date twice, pulled the hot tub out of the contract, argued about leaving the washer. I just wanted it done. Buyers walked instead. Said they didn't trust what else she'd lied about. And the arbitration went their way because technically she breached first. My broker asked why I didn't escalate sooner and I didn't have a good answer.

There was a second lien nobody mentioned. That's not even the HOA part, that's just how the whole thing started. We clear that up, takes three weeks, finally get to closing and the title company calls me and says there's an HOA transfer fee of eighteen hundred dollars that wasn't disclosed. Fine. Buyers are annoyed but they pay it. Then we get a letter, actual paper letter, saying the seller owes four thousand in back dues and there's a lien on the property and we can't close. The seller swears she paid everything. Swears on her kids. The HOA management company says no, she hasn't paid since 2021. Turns out there's two management companies. The old one and the new one. The old one was collecting payments and apparently just keeping them? Or lost them? Nobody knows. The new company has no records of anything before March of last year. We spent six days on the phone with people who kept transferring us to other people. The HOA board president works nights at a hospital and would only talk between 6 and 7 AM. One board member was in Costa Rica for a month. Buyers almost walked. Would've cost me the whole commission plus the marketing I already paid for. We ended up splitting the four thousand three ways, me and the seller and the buyers, just to make it close. I ate thirteen hundred dollars because two companies couldn't figure out who had the checkbook. The house was two hundred and ten thousand. My split was maybe six. I made nothing.