Boy Scouts have right idea for showing property

Larry Agranoff was bitten by a dog when showing a house one day, and he had to have emergency surgery.

According to a post published by the Larry and Sheila real estate team, who cover Long Island’s North Shore, there were 11 other mishaps involving showings by them alone.  In their words, verbatim, they included the following:

1. I fell on a path leaving a house and sprained my ankle;
2. Client tripped on a train set in a basement and had to be carried out;
3. Both the wife and husband stepped into doggy “mess” in sellers house while they were home;
4. Buyer’s car got stuck in mud at new construction site;
5. Client’s battery went dead on driveway;
6. Cat ran out of house;
7. Tried to show out-of-town clients a house that they drove 2 hours to see and lockbox was taken off and agent was away;
8. Buyer got “stuck” in bathroom for 25 minutes and homeowner was furious;
9. Opened the front door to a house where a pipe burst and we all got drenched;
10. Showed a house where there was an underground stream and the sump-pump broke and water was knee high in basement;
11. As we opened the back door to a Raised Ranch style home, we were just about to step out onto the deck, when we discovered the deck was missing.

They are not alone with such surprises.  In comments at the end of their post, other brokers chimed in:

1. My partner stepped into a garage to find the light and went flying off the ledge she did not know was there;
2. I lost the key to the home while I was showing it;
3. I found the entire house filled with duck poop and a scared duck flying flapping all over the house;
4. When I went to turn on the light switch, I found that it was actually a straight drop down onto the cement garage and end up breaking my right elbow;
5. Set off the alarm in a house where the husband gave us permission to enter (and I found later he was not allowed on or near the property);
6. Found a pair of women’s panties on the foyer floor (and my buyer sheepishly admitted they were hers and had fallen out of her pocket on the way in).

There were 70 more comments, but I’ll spare you all of them except my own most memorable experience, about which I wrote years ago.

It goes like this: A dentist who was a buyer and I entered an apartment in Washington, D.C., using a key supplied by the front desk.

I noticed a partly open purse on a table near the entrance and had a feeling that the place was occupied.  So I called out several times, but nobody answered.

The dentist and I explored the public rooms in the front and eventually made our way to the master bedroom, where we spotted an inert human lying on the bed.

My buyer — remember, a health-care professional — was out the front door so fast that I barely had time to turn around in the moments before he disappeared.  Was the owner dead?  I, too, didn’t hang around long enough to find out.

There always will be surprises in my job, but it’s hardly possible for any of us to be well enough prepared for the totally unexpected.

Tomorrow: Loan traps

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Malcolm Carter
Licensed Associate Real Estate Broker
Senior Vice President
Charles Rutenberg Realty
127 E. 56th Street
New York, NY 10022

M: 347-886-0248
F: 347-438-3201

Malcolm@ServiceYouCanTrust.com
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