FOOL'S GOLD

My sister died suddenly over a dozen years ago, leaving behind no possessions of much value, just a lot of painkillers, some cheap magazines, a few items of costume jewelry, a letter from a pilot she dated in healthier times, and two scruffy, stunted dogs. There was also, in one of those cheap, lockable steel boxes, a coupon from a real estate agent that entitled the bearer to “a free home evaluation”, with “no obligation”. A gold “seal” the size of a loonie was printed at its heart, and some frilly golden doodles marked the edge of the certificate. “If you don’t need this at the present time,” it said inelegantly along the bottom border, “just file it away with your other valuables. There is no expiry date on this special offer.”

I have no idea whether Tracy ascribed any value to it. She was smarter than that, I think, but she was also short on energy at the end, and you need plenty of that to sort through the offers and entreaties that come at us in the course of a normal week, and from there decide what’s true and what’s not. A good part of waking life has to be spent fighting off the sharks and the salespeople, pushing away the empty promises printed on shiny paper that flutters through the mail slot as lightly as a butterfly.

A similar coupon was delivered to my own house just this week. They’re everywhere this time of year. This one promised to give me “a good idea” of the market value of my home. It was, I was told, “a special free offer.” And once again, even in these much more mundane circumstances (I was folding towels at the dining room table and listening to a Guardian podcast when I heard the letter carrier), it still ticked me off.

Because here’s what’s really going on (and you probably know this already):

That coupon/voucher/certificate is really just a ploy to get into your house, to forge a connection with you, to have you feel obscurely obligated to whichever agent it is that ordered that a few trees be cut down for the printing press.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with offering a free home evaluation. But just know this: every single realtor in your community will be more than happy to price your house for you. To suggest that the offer is somehow “precious” or “valuable”, exceptional in any way, is just misleading. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the sort of person I want in my house. And that’s not the sort of person I wanted talking to my sister. Life’s too short.

*This is an edited and updated version of an old bit.