Unbelievable. The old adage is true: “if you come to the ballpark every day, you’ll see something you’ve never seen before.” Agent behavior never ceases to disappoint me, like vandalizing listings. Have you heard the one about agents that steal keys from lockboxes to discourage competing offers on hot listings? Well, today my Realty World colleague, Derek Miller, told me a real whopper. This takes the prize (to date, anyway) for the most classless act I’ve ever heard of. To my shame, it made me belly-laugh.
Derek took some clients to look at an aggressively priced bank-owned listing and couldn’t get the key to work, only to discover that someone had squeezed super-glue into the keyhole! So, of course, Derek and his clients couldn’t get in to view the property. Neither can anyone else, which I guess was the intention. Obviously we can’t say for sure that it was an agent, but . . . what would be the point how of something like that be for an ordinary prankster or delinquent? If it quacks like a duck . . .
From the window Derek could easily see that there had already been a lot of agents showing the house. Even though the listing was only a few days old, given the lack of inventory, there are bound to be numerous offers anyway. So why bother vandalizing the lockset?
Can we really be so desperate to win that we’re reduced to vandalism and stealing? C’mon already. Further disappointing is my anticipation that my posting a blog about this will actually contribute to the problem, because it will give the idea to someone else.
Wow, you are such an eloquent writer! Bravo.
Hi Mike, this just happened to us – My client is very disappointed today because she can’t view an REO property and that is because someone squeezed superclue into the keyhole! Coco
This is insane! I’m really hoping the decline in real estate “professionals” weeds out folks that would do something like this. Kind of reminds me of programmers that deliberately insert bad code into software, just to make it difficult for others.