Belt Auction

Have you had bad experiences with real estate agents?

People complain about lawyers, but have you ever seen the tricks by real estate agents?

Public Comments

1. My mom was shown a house by a real estate agent who was arrested the next day for murder. He apparently hid the bodies of his victims in the basements of the vacant houses he showed...no, he did not have any bodies hidden in the house he showed my mom. That would have been really creepy.
2. One of them didn't think I saw him kick his Titleist out of the rough one time. He shanked his next shot, anyway...There is a god.
3. There's a Realtor in my neighborhood that is a real pain in the a**. Every time I see her she is asking me when I'm moving. I have no intentions of moving, but she keeps asking. I finally stopped talking to her completely.
4. Yes, my wife and I had a bad experience with one just a short while ago. She was late everytime we were suppose to meet her, and she was even late to the settlement. We bought the house from some other agent but she listed it.
5. i've had a bad experience becoming one.
6. How about a realtor, 2 banks, lawyers, shadiness and stupidity? After telling this one, I have another from another state. 2 couples came to town with a get rich quick scheme in real estate. They got bank 1 to loan them the money for what is now my house, and moved into it. Then they got bank 1 to loan them money for another house that they would fix up and sell. Pretty soon they had another house to fix and sell, compliments of bank 2. And a 3rd fixer-upper, again from bank 2. Then they found they did not have the wherewithall to do the work on these 4 houses, so couple 1 ran, leaving couple 2 with 4 worthless properties, and a total debt of 104,000 dollars. How they talked the banks into loaning them that much is a mystery to me. So couple 2 filed bankruptcy and left town. Then the 2 banks got into a fight about who actually owned the properties, and between them, paid lawyers a total of 175,000 dollars to sort it out. I don't have the abstracts from the other 3 properties, so I don't know what happened to them, but mine finally came down to bank 2 claiming ownership. In the meantime, my house sat here abandoned for 4 years. Then I moved to town, to care for my elderly parents. I needed a place to live in this neighborhood, to rent or to buy right now. I looked around and saw this house. I peeked in a window, saw how bad it was, but it was a house, and I had to have one. I went to my mother's and started calling real estate agents. Nobody knew anything about this house. An hour later, a for sale sign magically appeared in the front yard of this house. So I called the realtor. Enter the realtor from Hell. He was on the board of directors of bank 2. They offered me the house, and they would carry the loan, for 10,000 dollars. I signed the contract and started a logging operation, just cleaning up the yard. The contract said they'd fix the wiring, the plumbing and termite the place. Before they'd even approved the loan, I decided to pay cash. The realtor shoved another contract in front of me, told me that I didn't have to read it, that it was identical to the other, that it just cancelled the loan. I was in a hurry, and I signed it. Then I hired a lawyer and left the 1st contract with him. Then I paid the realtor and bought insurance on the place, called an electrician, a plumber and an exterminator. I took their estimates to the realtor. He said that I had bought the house "as is", as if I had bought it at auction, and I was responsible for all repairs myself. I pointed out that according to the contract, he was. In his snottiest voice, he asked to see the contract, which I had with me, as if he didn't have a copy of it himself. I handed it over. He demanded that I show him where it said in that contract that he was responsible. That was the first time I had read the 2nd contract. So he got even snottier and asked just where the non-existent 1st contract I claimed to have signed was. I looked him straight in the eye and told him that it was in my lawyer's office. So what did I want done? Everything. And it got done. At their expense, not mine. They spent something like 3000 dollars in order to sell me a house for 10,000 dollars cash. 2 weeks after I moved in, the realtor called to ask me if I had insured the place, because they'd just discovered that they had not. A week after that, it turned out that they did not have clear title, so could not get clear title for me. I've no idea how much that cost them, but this is one of the few times that the customer won. I still live here 22 years later, and gradually, it's become a perfect little home, just right for us. Story 2. Moving to a new town with 5 kids in tow. I went to the new town looking for a place to rent. College town, boom time, nothing available. Finally found a realtor who offered to rent his mother's house to me, but insisted that I sign a year's lease. No problem. After I signed it, he said that it was subject to his mother's approval, but she'd be no problem. He also said that the lease was only a formality, and I could break it if I found another place, since the house might be too small for my large family. Okay, so his mother wanted a cleaning deposit, plus 1st and last month's rent in advance. No problem. Then I went back to the other side of the state to collect my husband, kids and stuff. We arrived on the move-in date, close to midnight. At midnight, the realtor's mother was sitting in the driveway, to tell us that she had changed her mind, and we could not move into her house. But she, having seen my exhausted kids, decided to relent, and allow us to stay there for 1 month, then we must move out. At the end of 1 month, after we had made multiple repairs and cleaning, and I had found another place, the realtor refused to refund the cleaning deposit or the last month's rent. He informed me that his mother had a right to that money because I was breaking the lease. I informed him that I was not breaking the lease, that he and his mother were, and I would take them to court and stay in their lousy house, if they did not cough up. They did. I met several college students over the next couple of years who had lived in that house for a month, and lost their money. Couldn't get a lawyer in that town who would touch the place, because the realtor's mother was the widow of a very prominent judge.