Sharks Patrol These Waters: a Retro-Rant

Today I'm dredging up an old draft of a post (4 month old) for mere amusement. I was green in many senses of the term, so look not too harshly upon the thoughts below...They were from a draft after all. This was written after our 3rd unsuccessful offer on a house, and prior to dealings with the house we now have. We had gotten word that local agents talked about black listing us and I was fuming mad, but ultimately paranoid, so I sat on this.

Don’t let your fingers dangle in the water (or so it goes, with due respect to indie band Morphine). It becomes increasingly more clear that the ‘way for the realtor’ is terribly unclear to me. It seems the more we pursue our house hunt, we encounter more and more unpleasantries from the agent-side of buying a house. The foibles of the many realtors we’ve acquainted have left us with a simmering dislike of the profession. Particular crimes include:

- False listings
advertising a 3-bedroom house, where one 'bedroom' is in the basement with 6‘-2” to 7’-0” ceiling height, and another has no closet
- Overly aggressive approach to “helping you find the right house”
when we really want to do the research ourselves at our own pace.
- Expecting the buyer to "find the right house" after 3-5 viewings
- Persistently NOT returning calls when requesting a viewing or just info
- dropping not-so-vague hints that they "really need to make this sale"
- using fictitious competing 'buyers' to get you to up your offer
- Flipping properties before they have even gone on market
to pocket themselves an easy 20%-100% markup (and thereby keep the market high)
- Selling Agents who don't bring your offer to the owner
so they can find their own buyer, thereby claiming double profits as Buying Agent, too

Am I bitter? Yes. Yes I am, perhaps mostly due to the fact that a realtor often earns as much or more selling a house than the Architect does whom had built it. It is the Architect whom has the extensive education/experience, strict regulations & licensure, liability, and CREATIVE SKILL…and the realtor? I won’t even bother, except to say that they all seem to drive Lexus’, BMWs & Mercedes and are overly concerned with the state of their fingernails.