By the time you read this, if the stars are aligned properly, my partner and I will have moved from a small, slightly shabby house in Coral Ridge to a slightly larger, much shabbier house in Coral Ridge. The fact that I am trading up from shabby to shabbier might not be regarded as progress in some circles, but I generally tend to set my sights pretty low.
The process of buying one home and selling another in South Florida in 2011 could be the subject of a book, but all I will say is that real estate transactions would be delightful if you could eliminate realtors, bankers, home inspectors, buyers and sellers.
Over the course of the last 10 months, which is how long it took for us to actually identify the house we wanted to buy, buy it, sell our old house and move into the new one, we have had near daily communication with realtors. If I were to draw any one single conclusion, it is that whether the realtor is representing the buyer or the seller, they are looking out for their own best interests first and foremost. If their interests and the best interests of their clients are in sync, life is grand. If not well, every man for himself.
If realtors are maddening, bankers are worse. You would think the job of a banker is to lend money but you would be wrong. A banker’s job is to make sure that no matter what happens, good or bad, that they are not blamed for it. Since we are a relentlessly middle class couple, we actually had to obtain financing for the new house. We thought that since we had good credit, stable jobs and a down payment that this would suffice. We were wrong. The mortgage process “since the meltdown” (a phrase used with annoying frequency) is more complete and invasive than a prostate exam.
The highlight of the mortgage process, occurred when I was pleading for any answer, yes or no, to our loan application was when a senior VP of a major bank called me. He explained (I am not making this up) that because of “bad people” who “choose not pay their mortgages” everyone must suffer. I momentarily forgot my own angst to when I learned that financial problems are really a moral issue.
Realtors and bankers are the main players in the transaction, but there are bit-players as well. I met home inspectors who noted every burned out light bulb and broken sprinkler head but missed the black mold and exposed electrical wiring. Of course, every realtor, banker and inspector has an assistant, generally very sweet, very young and totally clueless. These people do as they’re told, no matter how inane.
And of course, hovering in the background are the buyers and the sellers. These are nervous creatures who hover optimistically over the entire process, checkbook in hand, desperately wondering if they will ever make it to the holy grail: The Closing. I never met the people whose house we bought, nor the couple who bought our house. The realtors, bankers and inspectors are desperate to keep these groups apart for fear that we may discover that we are all nice people working towards a common goal, a goal that could be achieved more easily without realtors, bankers, and inspectors.
I had lunch with a friend who has watched this saga unfold for almost a year. She and her husband found a fixer-upper and were debating whether to proceed. “Any advice?” she asked.
My response was uncharacteristically short: “Don’t.”