Good morning all.
I thought today I should get you up to speed with house hunting and our real estate agents. It seems the market must be sooooo good that everyone is just a little too big for their britches (that sounds old) to do any work to sell a house. If you are able to get a hold of an agent they pretty much want you the buyer to hand them the houses you want to look at and then, they really only want to sell one of their own houses. If you aren't interested in their listings, they refer you on to someone else to make the sale, yet!!!!! they still get a referral commission for doing nothing.
So let's backtrack:
1st agent was prearranged from the company we dealt with in Manitoba. She knew the approx date we were arriving, upon arrival we contacted her several times by phone, email, and txt and only once she phoned back but never even left a msg. All the while I looked at listings on line setting up several accounts to get listings sent to my email.
2nd agent: Found a few houses that we wanted to look at and contacted another company. He was I am guessing too busy himself and passed us on to Harlee
3rd agent Harlee: Sent me computer generated listings on a very vague criteria, based on what I had told her. These listings were all ones I had reviewed on other sites and only 1 was of interest along with 1 of the houses we had originally asked about. She informed me that one house was already sold and she would create a new list for us because I commented about the criteria. But didnt arrange for us to look at the other house. Hmmmm... Finally she reffered us to another agent to look at the house because it was out of her area? Really? It is one hour north of Fredericton.
4th agent the referral: We had to contact him ourselves, left a message and heard nothing.
5th agent called the next day: 24 hours later to let us know that we had been referred to him by agent 4, sheesh agent 4 didn't even bother to contact us. Okay so now we are dealing with Kevin, who informs us that he will go pretty much anywhere we want to look at houses. We looked at the 2 houses that I talked about the other day.(Thursday). We had one of the listings from my own searches that we wanted to go see and he was going to make an appointment as well as hook us up with an agent in Grand Manan Island for the Saturday that we were there. Well that didnt happen. From Friday to Sunday morning I continued to send him listings and heard nothing and no mention about Grand Manan either.
Agent 6: So here it is very early Sunday morning and a new set of listings had come out and there were 3 other houses that we wanted to go see. Since we hadn't heard from Kevin, I contacted the agent of 1 of the houses and again got someone else that was going to help us. She (I dont even remember her name) told us not to worry that there were 4 agents in her company that would help us find a house. She would get right on the listings and make some appointments, she would get back to us right away! We heard nothing.....I even contacted her a couple of times, surely she must have heard from someone by now? No response, then finally she had 1 house for us to look at, but we were going to be referred to another agent. Ok, I'm still holding it together but barely....and we wait, nothing.
Agent 7: There was one house in particular I wanted to see so I finally left a message with the listing agent directly to see the house. It did take a while but he finally arranged an appointment for Monday at 11AM, but there already was 1 offer on the house and the closing for offers was 5pm Monday. That would be a 6 hour decision.....
All while this was going on, we had driven up to Shediac to be tourists, and there were way too many people there for the flea market weekend. Couldn't even get into town there was so many cars and no place to park.
We headed off to Port Elgin (at the Confederation Bridge to PEI) a sleepy little town nothing available as far as real estate.
Then there was agent 8 Stephanie: Apparently Kevin had referred us on to her without telling us and she contacted me by email but again wanted our house criteria. I really had had it by then and just wanted to see what agent 7 was going to do (didn't have appointment yet). I sloughed her off and said we were moving on and only going to commit to an agent that did the work and we were not going to get passed on while an agent would still get some kind of commission. I also told her that if she didn't have the criteria, then Kevin wasn't doing his job either. She wasn't taking no for an answer....she came back with the info from Kevin. She said she would set things up right away for us and send me some listings that she thought may be of interest. I'm still not convinced but Tom and I agreed to give her a chance. I sent her the 4 listings we wanted to see and within minutes she had knocked 2 of them down as no with her explanations that #1 would be so close to another neighbour and the other house was in need of serious repairs. She would get back to me about appoints for the others.
By then I had heard back from Agent 7 to show us the house and Stephanie had knocked out the 3rd house and said that she wouldn't take on the 4th house if Agent 7 was showing it, and she informed us that the house of Agent 7 did already have an offer. This girl was working for us before we were even hiring her.... We would talk seriously on Tuesday after we looked at the house and she started to send us listings in preparation. Ok Stephanie, we are hearing you.......
We got back to camp and Agent 6-ish finally had an appointment for us and another agent was going to meet us. At the same house I already made an appointment with directly long before she responded. I just told her we had moved on and we were working directly with the agent.
We were both numb, even thinking about moving on to maybe Nova Scotia or PEI? It was tiring and so frustrating.
Even supper was tiring, leftover chicken and left over stuff from Friday. We are done with leftovers.
Today with all the frustration, I think the best part of the day was driving through this beautiful province and enjoying the company of my husband. For that I am grateful!
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