NEW LISTING - 79 COLBORNE ST - $889,000

79 Colborne St is beautiful, of course, but not particularly glamorous. It is more glamorous-in-waiting, like the brilliant teenager slumming it in front of a Playstation console (in an old Lou Reed T-shirt).

NEW LISTING - 6189 BATTERSEA ROAD - $715,000

A remarkable, thrilling rammed earth house on two of the most interesting acres you’ll ever likely see, just twenty minutes north of the city. I’ve been waiting for this one for a very long time.

ON DEATH AND SALES

Real estate agents gather brightly, like fireflies, around disease and death. End times energize them. There is all sorts of money in the just-vacated two-up, two-downs, even with all that tired lace drooping over the chipped porcelain sink, the dank orange shag and the panelled rec rooms thick with old smoke and Pine-Sol.

I dwelt not very productively on this idea while ferrying my mum to and from the hospital through the first half of April, and then when simply visiting her, after going home to my dad had faded as much of a possibility. On the wall of the elevator up to the ICU on Davies 4, a father and son real estate team pose enthusiastically above their cell numbers. Call now! They appear absurdly robust and corrosively tanned. Invincible, but in the style of cartoon villains about to run off a cliff.

A bus bench outside the hospital is plastered with another agent’s milk-fed mug, and a bus vinyl-wrapped with an “If I can’t sell it, I’ll buy it myself” message seems to pass the main doors every twenty minutes, all royal blue and blood-red, like a Conservative campaign bus. There are more realtors in these parts than there are doctors.

When my mother died on April 30th, all the sales pitches I’d seen again and again those few weeks seemed, predictably, to be in ill-taste, just a foul gibberish from vultures’ tongues (do vultures have tongues?). But even as some measure of normalcy has returned, the business I’m part of, the one that pays my bills, and which has offered a reasonable-seeming path through the middle part of my life, feels intensely, weirdly dependent on the death of its clients.

A dozen or so years ago my sister died suddenly. Among her few possessions was one of those awful postcards embossed with a faux-gold seal and offering a “free home evaluation”: Keep this certificate with your other valuable possessions, it begged, and my sister (who never owned her own house) had played along. She had the pitch of a conman tucked underneath her meagre stash of costume jewelry like it was a hundred-dollar bill.

The undertaker that time around was a part-time real estate agent. He seemed perfectly poised for great success in life: he could have his cake and bury it too. Within minutes of my leaving his office he had logged into his real estate account and checked to see how busy an agent I was.

Realtors’ calling cards - and this is my last observation - often feature glossy photographs of the agent (usually grinning). The idea, plainly, is to make the agent recognizable at the gas station or in line at Loblaws. And because everyone wants to talk about houses, you can generate business while waiting to pay for your mushrooms. (For a couple of years, every time I went shopping the same agent was in there, pushing a cart up and down in front of the best cuts of meat.)

Most interesting to me, though, is how often the photos are severely outdated. Vanity or maybe plain old forgetfulness mean the old photo doesn’t always get switched out for something recent, something true. But I have a theory: the real message of these cards is that realtors never die, or even age at a normal rate. There are cheat codes sewn into the lining of all those shiny blazers. And if you get in touch (call now!) they just might teach you how to pull off the same trick yourselves, ultimately saving your kids from having to reach out in the future to sniff that you’ve died and the house needs to be sold, peach shag and all. Boiled down, phoning your realtor is the way to live forever and protect your kids from suffering. It’s quite a pitch.

33 MACCAULEY ST - $250,000

A detached three-bedroom home with an attached garage/workshop not far from downtown Kingston. Work and then ample reward for that work, all wrapped up in a stuccoed package. The lot is 50 x 132, which makes all sorts of renovations possible.

Any offers will be reviewed a week from now, on the 14th.

608 BAGOT ST - $549,872

A detached downtown duplex with a big three-bedroom unit on the main floor (vacant and renovated and ready to go) and a tenanted two-bedroom unit upstairs.

OFF THE MARKET

MUSINGS