The Complainer

I’m a complainer at root. Irritations rise to the surface more readily than pleasures.  

I try much harder than I used to, though, for balance. I appreciate that mostly people are simply trying to get from A to B while causing as little pain and as much joy as possible. I try hard to give credit. But it’s awfully late in the day for me to think I might yet find a sunnier path. I know full well the deep track I’ve carved. My hope is that a few brightish sentiments can provide a foothold, a way of climbing closer to the sun’s warmth.

I’ll aim for that. I swear. But in the meantime there’s still some stuff. And here’s what’s bothering me (and pleasing me) right now in real estate:

The reappearance of open houses. It’s completely unnecessary and it’s unsafe. We did just fine without them the last year and a half. We employed virtual tours, and did a lot of remote walkthroughs for locked-down buyers. I’m going to lose this battle (of course I am), and so everyone attending should need a vaccine passport. If you need one to sit in your local Wendy’s, or to board a plane, book a hotel room, then you should absolutely need one to get into a stranger’s house and cough into the cupboards. Most of this essential business is anything but.

We’ve learned the last eighteen months that we need to spend more of our commissions on professional marketing. It’s an entirely positive evolution of how we go about our work. I remember how, a few years back, a grim picture of a wet towel flung over the back of a rocking chair appeared on the daily hotsheet. The label on the photograph said simply, “Bathroom” and I haven’t been able to talk normally to that realtor since. There really ought to be a law. 

That commitment to quality means most of us have been ordering good virtual tours and accurate floor plans, maybe even drone footage. The visuals are fantastic. We’ve also needed to write better advertising copy. It’s not okay any more to resort to inane chatter about our “cozy” listings, and our “unspoiled” basements, our “doll houses” and our “well-maintained” side-splits. These cliches just don’t cut it. And most realtors in Kingston have risen to these challenges. The quality of listing presentations is very high, despite how difficult that can be for agents who are just starting out, or who are are struggling to pay the bills.  Real estate is an enormously expensive racket. The monthlies can be like trying to come up with the cash for three or four extra mortgages.

That said, the appearance of my own words, my turns of phrase, the deliberate aping of my style, in another’s listings, the oh-so-casual theft, really gets to me. I can hear their objections: They’re only words … Like, who owns the wind, man? But the thing is, I’ve chased some of those images for weeks, whittling language into shapes that, sure, can come across as utterly mundane. But they are still mine. And occasionally they are also strong enough to cast a genuinely new light on this or that living space. I take pride in them, and it bugs the hell out of me to see those descriptions show up under another agent’s name. It feels like someone’s stealing my wheels. If it was a poem, or a recipe, a photograph, a song, they wouldn’t try it. What makes a real estate listing so different? And it’s not just happening to me. I’ve seen property descriptions recycled almost word for word when a listing passes from one agent to another. So let’s have less of that, please. Find your own damn style. Sell your own damn house.

I’m winding down here, but let me say that thirty minutes is too small a window for a proper showing. I don’t know how, if I’m out on tour, I’m supposed to show and view each house properly, and travel between them, and unlock and lock up, and get my shoes off, and then back on to view the basement, and discuss the pros and cons, if I’m only given half an hour. These ridiculous appointment schedules lead to stressed buyers who have to offer on properties without even a clear understanding of the layout, let alone whether the roof is failing, or the window seals. It also means we’re running into each other all over the place, squeezing through hallways, and sharing space when what we need is precisely the opposite.

And finally (and personally), I think realtors should need to be fully vaccinated to go about their business. Buyers and sellers should be able to trust their realtor not to put them at risk out there; it really is that simple.