Over the last few months, Significant Other and I have been spending months hunting for a house both of us want to live in. Both of us had no prior experience to this, so we went in with eyes wide open. No one warned us that we would have our asses handed to us by real estate agents.
Our house hunting nightmare started with us looking through the classified sections for places for sale that we were interested in, and calling the real estate agents in charge. Sounds simple enough? That’s what we thought until none of them called us back about our inquiries. We actually had to call them back to ask if they had any news, to which most of them would reply with oh, we haven’t checked yet, we’ll call you when we do. And then they never call back. Or we’d call them again but they’d just refuse to pick up the phone. Really, you’d think that with the state of the economy they’d be dying to make a sale.
Every now and then we’d get a real estate agent who would make a date with us to view a place, but once we were done with the viewing and asked for additional info they never got back to us.
Really, it was very irritating.
Some time later, we finally managed to meet ONE agent who actually called back when we made an inquiry about a particular place we were interested in buying. Significant Other and I fell in love with the condo unit, and wanted to buy it. He requested for an unit with two parking lots, and she showed us one. We were sold on the place, and decided to book the unit.
And then we discovered that she was trying to con us.
The day Significant Other was supposed to sign the booking agreement, the agent was late. By fifty minutes. And then she tried to make Significant Other sign the agreement in the car, which he declined because he obviously wanted to read the contract. Thankfully he did, because it stated that we were only supposed to have one parking lot. Not two.
When Significant Other pointed that out to her, she tried to cover it up by stating that “by lot no.29, they actually mean there’s lot 29 and lot 29B.” WHAT KIND OF BULLSHIT IS THAT??!
So obviously the contract never got signed. She called him back for days afterwards trying to get him to change his mind, or perhaps look at another unit. Significant Other stopped picking up her calls. BTW, if you are reading this post and you happen to be that particular agent, PLEASE GO DIE IN A FIRE.
Shortly afterwards we contacted yet another real estate agent (the only reliable real estate agent we managed to get ahold of, I think mostly because she was recommended by a friend *rolls eyes*). We had contacted her much earlier about some townhouses in Hartamas, which were nice, but too expensive. She had mentioned at one point that we had a colleague handling the condo we liked, so she and her colleague showed us another unit. With two parking lots, guranteed.
We immediately decided to book it.
That finally brought us to the end of our nightmare. Although, judging by the way our agents argued tirelessly with the unit owner’s real estate agent to let us book the place instead of holding out for a better offer, it seems like there are many unpleasant twists and turns out to surprise the uninitiated home buyer.
Next time, I guess we should just buy a property straight from the fucking developers. Hopefully THAT’S easier than navigating this stupid minefield.
