A Five Hour Home Inspection and How a Promiscuous Buyer Made a Commitment
Thursday evening at 6.30 I headed home from one of my recently sold listings. I had just turned over five hours of my life to the longest home inspection I have ever endured.
If you haven’t participated in a home inspection lately (or ever), the point of this enterprise is to provide the home buyer with a deeper understanding of what he or she is buying and to ensure that the home is not a moldering piece of fly-attracting excrement.
I had never met Thursday’s inspector so I had no preconceived notion of his modus operandi. And though he spent five sweeps of the big hand past the top of the hour in this three-level home, his pain-staking exploration found nothing of particular consequence. Certainly nothing to provoke the buyers to flee the deal screaming.
So we invested five hours (plus the hour-and-a-half more he spent before everyone else arrived on the roof and checking out the exterior) and I found out these three things:
- the house is in good shape
- the inspector was extremely exacting
- the buyers are funny and interesting people
My personal philosophy at home inspections is to lay low and stay out of the inspector’s way. He’s there to do a job and my job is to let him do his job with little to no interference. One of the most enervating things I’ve encountered when transacting a piece of property is a yipping listing agent who feels the need to argue with the inspector about everything.
So anyway, hour one, hour two, hour three, etcetera, are wending their way into the history books and I chit chat with the various participants in the transaction. Somewhere in the second hour after several brief conversational flurries I fire up the Blackberry and name trace the buyers and find out that he is a well-respected digital photographer and she is a prominent doctor who studies sleep patterns and disorders.
It must have been the third hour when I asked how she and her husband came to work with Rafael. “Well,” she responded, “we had been rather promiscuous.” A funny way to put it, but the terminology resonated with me.
It turns out they had called on a property when they reached Rafael. As is the case at just about every brokerage, Rafael was responding to an inquiry that did not involve his listing. But his demeanor was comfortable and professional. Time passed and they wound up calling him with questions about other places.
Pretty soon the occasional phone calls turned into something more…Â they evolved into a full-fledged commitment.
When you think about it, finding a realtor resembles courtship. It’s not about the romance, it’s about the trust. Who said it, I don’t know, but someone with a book on a shelf in a Barnes & Noble has undoubtedly written that relationships are about finding the someone that complements you, that fills that gap that exists in you. Since people buying homes don’t always have a full breadth of experience undertaking this stressful and expensive activity they turn to a realtor to “fill that gap” and help them do it well and do it right.
After the search bears fruit and a home is found, the next step for the realtor is to help the buyers make a fully informed decision regarding the property through a home inspection. And while I am not a fan of such L O N G inspections as last Thursday, I recognize them for what they are - an important part in the home-buying process, a critical part that helps to “fill that gap.”
At any rate, a few minor details remain to be ironed out but it looks like it’s all systems go for an end-of-the-month closing.
In the meantime I hope you will join me in wishing my son Lucas a happy first birthday.
Born March 10, 2007, Lucas Storm Hilario McCarey has been a gracious source of uninhibited joy in our lives. With intense blue eyes that gaze in a thoughtful fashion from early in the morning through the latter portion of the evening, Lucas possesses an old soul that is here on this earth to do things of consequence. And silly things like morning or afternoon naps are minor irritants that he doesn’t abide by. Witness the flight back from Rome the day before New Year’s Eve when he opted to nap for all of 20 minutes on the 11 hour flight.
Happy birthday beautiful!
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Happy Birthday Lucas!!!! Tom, I’m sure you can pass that to him from me. I enjoy keeping up with you and your great family through your blog. Keep up the good work!