It’s just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
‘Cause that’s my fun day
My I don’t have to run day
It’s just another manic Monday

Ah, yes, The Bangles!

From their 1986 album “Different Light,” which was their most successful album.  “Manic Monday” reached #2 on the USA charts, but it was the other single on this album, “Walk Like An Egyptian,” that reached #1.

Who’s a better all-female band: The Bangles or The Spice Girls?  And why?

“Just Another Manic Monday” is an interesting song for me personally, since, if we’re being honest, it’s usually the other way around.

The protagonist of the song is coming down off a weekend high and lamenting that it’s back to the grind on Monday.  Whether it’s a 9-to-5 job, or school, or just life, Monday morning has a certain feel to it that almost always makes you long for Saturday and Sunday.

In my life, Monday morning puts me back on track.

And truth be told, as I willingly admit to my wife, the weekends – with two small children, are a hell of a lot harder than even the frenetic pace of the Toronto real estate market.

My wife is a saint.  Truly.  As are all mothers who look after small children, and that’s something that only a parent with kids can attest to.  A person who’s never had children will say things like, “Oh, you’re not working?  You’re just at home with the kids?”  That person wouldn’t last thirty minutes with a 2 1/2 and a 5 1/2 year old…

Selling real estate at a high level in the Toronto real estate market is exhausting, demanding, and grueling at times, and it’s constant.  Literally 24/7.  But it’s a hell of a lot easier to negotiate the sale of a midtown semi-detached home than it is to negotiate who gets the one toy, in a house FULL of toys, that both kids want at the exact same time…

Sitting down on Sunday night to write this post, I couldn’t help but think to myself, “After the weekend that I just had, Monday is going to be a blessing.”

Folks, this is one of those blogs that will have you saying, “You just can’t make this stuff up.”  It’s why there are so many television shows about real estate.  It’s why real estate is the gift that keeps on giving.

For those that find my statistics posts boring and prefer the stories, this one’s for you.

Here’s a few choice chapters from the weekend that was…

–

“Rules Are Made To Be Broken!”

I currently have a listing outside the central core that’s been a tough go.

The property is tenanted, and as I have written before many times, selling a home with sitting tenants isn’t easy.

We’ve had some issues throughout this listing and as a result, we have agreed to scale back showings and only allow showings at certain times.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 5:00pm to 7:00pm, and with 24 hours’ notice.

It’s not ideal.  Far from it, in fact.  But it is what it is, and it’s my job to make do.

On Friday morning, and agent emailed me and asked, among other things, “Can I get in there today?”  I told her that, per the showing instructions on MLS, we could only accommodate viewings with 24 hours’ notice and also only on Mon/Tues/Wed/Thurs from 5:00pm to 7:00pm.  Read between the lines: not today.

I went about my day, not giving this benign email conversation a second thought.

I was doing a purchaser visit up in Thornhill Woods at 3:00pm when the tenant emailed me and said:

“David, one of your agents from your office came to the house directly.  She brought her buyer to see the property.  My wife and I are both on calls.  My daughter just got home from school and is doing school work.  My son is sleeping.  I told her she is NOT allowed in the house.”

WTF?

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention: this agent happens to work for my brokerage.

I have zero affiliation with this agent.  I don’t know her, nor do I care to.  But the fact that we both have “BOSLEY” on our business card makes this situation a thousand times worse.

I called the agent and she picked up the line, all pleasant and ready to make banter.

I asked her, “Did you just go to see (address) without an appointment?”

She said, “Oh don’t worry, I was in the area with my client and we thought maybe they’d be okay to let us in the house.”

I was shocked.

Of all the things I’ve complained about on this blog in the last few years, this is among the most insane things I’ve experienced.

“What in the world were you thinking?” I asked her.

“I beg your pardon?” she said.  Amazingly, she then began to defend herself and try to justify what amounted to a trespass.

“I was very kind,” she said.  “I was courteous.  I just asked them simply if we could come in for a look.”

I lost my shit.

“I told you this morning that this was a difficult listing and that we were ONLY allowing showings between 5pm-7pm on Monday through Thursday, and with 24 hours’ notice.  What part of you took this to mean that you could show up, without an appointment, on a Friday afternoon, and knock on their fucking door?”

Yeah, I swore.  I rarely blow up, and I know you might not believe that, on account of all the stories I tell on TRB, but keeping your emotion in check is one of the most important facets of this business.

But I didn’t care.

This was stupidity at its absolute greatest and I was personally offended by this woman’s actions.

She said, “It’s not like I committed a crime,” and continued to defend herself.

“There are only two words that should be coming out of your mouth,” I told her.  “The first is ‘I’m,’ the second is ‘sorry,'” I said.

She continued to justify her actions and then said, “I tried calling you, but you didn’t answer,” as though it was my fault.

I told her, “This is an incredible combination of arrogance, disrespect, and a lack of common sense.  It’s a beautiful cornucopia of stupidity.”

Then I hung up.

I haven’t spoken to an agent like that in years.  Truly.  But two days later, as I write this, I still can’t get over it.

Now, I had to address this with the tenants, who were clearly pissed.

I texted them back, trying to make things better, but in the end, this just made the situation more convoluted.

I mean, you, the reader, will love this.  It’s the unfortunate punch-line to this story, which was memorable already thus far, but which becomes an “all-timer” once I tell you the following…

Driving on the 407 at the time, I voice dictated to the tenant:

“I’m so sorry.  This should not have happened.”

I clicked send.

I then voice dictated, “For what it’s worth, I tore a strip off her.”

I clicked send.

For those of you that know how inaccurate voice-dictation on an iPhone can be, you’ll know that you always want to proofread before you click send.

I did not, unfortunately.

And instead of sending, “For what it’s worth, I tore a strip off her,” I sent the tenant an auto-corrected, “For what it’s worth, I have a strap on.”

Yup.

That’s what I wrote to the tenant, and to make matters worse, I didn’t check my phone again for about seven or eight minutes.

Upon seeing this, I did the old *asterisk correction with, “*I tore a strip off her” and sent it to him, thinking maybe this would clear things up.

But he then clicked on “For what it’s worth, I have a strap on” and reacted with a thumb’s-up.

Any ideas what I’m supposed to do now?

–

“What’s Luck Got To Do With It?”

I wear a lot of hats in my job.

Yes, I’m a real estate broker.  But I also play financial planner, life coach, and marriage counselor on a regular basis.

On Saturday afternoon, the latter of those three occupations was on full display after clients of mine got into a domestic in the backyard of a midtown Toronto home.

They’re blog readers, so I’m not exactly telling tales out of school here.  They also agreed, upon the conclusion of this experience, that they’ll find the story funny in a few days, and the wife said, “I’m sure I’ll be reading about this on your blog.”

We were looking at a beautiful midtown house in even more beautiful weekend weather, and after touring the inside of the home, we finished out back on this awesome new deck.

He seems to think that a back deck is important and he put a huge valuation on this new deck.

She couldn’t possibly care less and called the deck “overbuilt.”

He wants to entertain!  He wants a huge deck.  He wants room for a barbecue and a smoker, and he wants to eat outside every night that the weather will allow.

She wants a lawn for the kids.  She doesn’t want to waste half the backyard with a deck so that he can barbecue.  She wants to eat inside where there are no bugs.

On this, they disagreed.

And here we stood, in the pleasant weather, surrounded by the elements, the three of us, talking on the deck.

Ah, the elements.  Right.

He called her out when she said, “I don’t want to eat outside; there’s bugs, mosquitos, and bees in July and August…”

I just stood there, grinning like an idiot.

She said the deck was too big and the yard was too small.  He said it was perfect.

And just when she extended her arms out, took an inhale, and looked like she was about to acquiesce, something magical happened.  Something that seemed so well-timed, it could only be a conspiracy between Mother Nature, the real estate Gods, and Captain Irony.

A bird crapped on her head.

Yes.  That happened.

We’ve all probably been crapped on by a bird or some sort of fowl, once before.  When I was in London in April, we visited an Owl Sanctuary and when it was my turn to have the owl fly from my outstretched arm, to its perch, and back again, the owl concluded by dumping on my sweater.

But in somebody’s face?

Here, on Saturday, in this midtown Toronto backyard, the bird crap was plentiful.  Thick and rich like Ragu, but white.

It reminded me of being “slimed” on that TV show from when we were kids, “You Can’t Do That On Television.”  It landed on her head but immediately dripped down both sides of her face, like white sideburns.

The husband, which he will freely admit, reacted in the worst way possible; he pointed at her and said “Oh……yeah!”

Oh yeah?  Wait…..what?

It was like Sean William Scott in “Old School” when Will Ferrell shoots himself with the dart.

I ran into the kitchen to get some paper towels and I swear I missed maybe twelve seconds, but I came outside and she was saying, “Are you fucking kidding me with this now?”

He said, “I’m serious, it’s a sign!”

He added, “We have to buy a lottery ticket!”

We then stood on the deck while she wiped possibly the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in a long time from her face and hair, while he told me all about how getting crapped on by a bird is good luck, and he pulled out his phone to Google it, but she shut that down and said, “Can we please get out of here?”

She rushed through sideyard and she said, “David, can you get us a copy of the home inspection,” to which she yelled, “Seriously?  Can we go?”

It’s not all bad though.  They called me on Saturday night and we laughed about it, a lot!

But this was just one more part of my weekend which was a total sh!t show, no pun intended…

–

“Ignorance Is Bliss!”

This story is going to sound familiar to the first one, and at the risk of turning this into “hating on agents” piece, it’s worth telling.

Almost all real estate showings are booked online.  The systems in place are great.  You get your half-hour window from, say, 2:00pm to 2:30pm, you’re told where the lockbox is, what the code is, and it’s pretty hard to screw this up.

…pretty hard to screw this up…

Famous last words, right?

As I have mentioned before, there are all kinds of problems that arise from lacking common sense.  Agents don’t know how to find a lockbox, how to open one, how to close one, or how to punch in a code.  Thank God we got rid of those “alpha” codes that were like opening your high-school locker.

There are agents that show up early, late, or stay too long.  Agents lock the door on other agents.  Agents show up on the wrong day.  Agents book for Saturday, June 18th at 2:00pm, when they meant to book for Saturday, June 11th at 2:00pm, then show up when they don’t have an appointment.

On Sunday, I had a new one!  An awful one, but a new one at that.

My client was in her house at 4:00pm, doing dishes in the kitchen, with her son playing in the dining room, when the front door opened and a man walked inside.

To some, that could pretty scary, right?  To others, it could be trauma-inducing.

He walked through the living room and into the dining room, saw the young child, then said, “Oh!  Wow!  Hello!”

My client was startled and screamed.  I asked her what she said, and she told me, “I didn’t say anything.  I just stood there with my jaw open, looking for words.”

The man said, “Sorry, sorry, oh I’m so sorry.  I have an appointment!” then he stood there smiling.

She looked at her watch, then him, then said, “What time is your appointment?”

He said, “Uhhhh, I don’t know.  I think, maybe, maybe five o’clock?”

She said, “But it’s four o’clock.”

He said, “Yeah, but I, um, I don’t know what time the appointment was for.  I just thought, maybe, you know, the house is empty and it’s for sale, and there’s nobody home.”

She said, “But I’m home.  I’m here with my son.  You’re an hour early.”

He shrugged.  She said it was like an animal in a kid’s cartoon shrugging as if to say, “Whoops!”

She asked him for his business card, presumably to ensure that he was, in fact, the 5:00pm agent.

But this is where the story goes off the rails, folks.

He said, “I don’t have a business card,” and she responded, “What do you mean?  Don’t you carry a business card?”  She was having none of this!

He then clarified, with a smile, and with an attitude that showed just how a-okay this situation was, by saying, “No, no, no, you misunderstood, I don’t have a business card because I’m not the agent.  I’m the buyer.”

I don’t know how she didn’t knock his teeth out.  She deserves a medal.

She said, “What the hell?” and he quickly interjected and offered, “My agent is running late, he said to go ahead, it’s okay, nobody is home.”

Upon realizing now that she had a complete stranger in her home, without his authorized representative, who illegally entered a property, she told him, “Please get out of my house!”

She said “please.”  We’re so Canadian, eh?

Incredibly, he remarked, “This is an odd way to treat somebody who wants to buy your house,” before he left.

Now, how did I deal with this, you’re wondering?  What was the justification when I called the real estate agent?

When I dumped my laundry list of broken rules on him, including him giving the lockbox code to his client and the buyer showing up an hour before the scheduled showing time, the agent accepted zero responsibility and said he didn’t give the client the lockbox code.  I asked him, “How did he open the lockbox?”  The agent said, “He must have just guessed the code.”

There’s nothing I can do, by the way.  A complaint with RECO would go nowhere.  I have no proof that this agent gave his client the lockbox code, even thought that’s exactly what happened.

–

Okay, this is already too long for yet another story, but can I just tell you quickly what else happened?

A real estate agent broke the unit key off in the lock of one of my listings, and then left, accepted no responsibility and told me it’s my fault for having a “sticky lock.”  That’ll be a $200-$300 fix through property management on Monday.

A property we were going to bring to market this month had a small (large?) flood in the basement and is now on hold indefinitely.

The tradesperson I had at my house on the weekend to replace our baseboards – which have been missing since our basement flood in February of 2020, worked a solid 12-hour day only to find his car wouldn’t start when he went to leave.  I called CAA for him.  They took an hour to arrive.  Then it took an hour for the car to start.  By the time these guys both left, my wife was in bed.  Oh, and this happened to be her birthday.

A buyer agent called me on Sunday and said her clients had their mortgage commitment pulled (one of them lost his job) and we are scheduled to close this month.  This will be an interesting one.

And last but not least, since I feel like I could do this all night, but want to hit the hay, one of my clients, who didn’t use our services to list her property for lease and secure a tenant because she “could do it herself,” emailed me on Sunday morning to say that the tenant she found took possession on June 1st and is using the property as an AirBnB.

Sigh.

Just another manic weekend.

I wish it was Monday…