Another year is almost in the books!

Hard to imagine, right?

It seems, quite literally, like I was just writing a three-part blog series with “Burning Questions For 2022.”

And now here we sit, about to enter the last throes of the 2022 real estate market before it completely dies out before Christmas.

As tradition goes, I usually dump every remaining “MLS Musing” into one post at the end of the year, and the readers have been quite active of late sending me examples of what amuses them while browsing listings.

So let’s get right into it, shall we?

Here’s one that a friend sent me with the caption, “This isn’t creepy at all, right?”

That feels like a semi-finished, little-used half-storey on the third level of a house.

But it felt, in my mind, eerily reminiscent of the camera angle of the Overlook Hotel in 1980’s, “The Shining….”

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Here’s one that a reader emailed with a caption that said, “Why…..just……why?”

Taking photos of front doorways is a no-no, as is.

But when they look like Dexter is carving up a victim inside, I think leaving them out of the array on MLS is a no-brainer…

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This one came with a caption that read, “Calling all vampires.”

The funny thing is, it’s not a bad photo.  It’s not off-centre, or odd-angled, and the lighting is good.

The problem is, um, ya know, it’s a photo of 1/4 of a room with the blinds pulled down!

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A colleague in my office sent me these:

How does this even get on MLS?

This is a screen-shot of an iPhone, right?

An agent took a screen-shot of his photos, with the photo roll viewable in the bottom.

And as the red arrow shows in the first photo, you can see him in the photo roll!

What in the world does the client think?  Seriously.  Somebody paid for this!

It’s one thing to forego a professional photographer and use iPhone photos, but it’s another thing altogether to be so lazy you can’t email the actual photos, but rather you screen-shot your iPhone as you flip through your photo roll, and end up sending crap like that!

This is an all-timer, folks.  It’s going in the “ALL TIME” folder.

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The rental market is tough out there!

This really doesn’t help:

Is this tough to picture in your mind?

Don’t worry, they supplied a photo:

“Now accepting applications.”

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Full marks for honesty on this one:

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It’s one thing to leave the television on when taking photos for MLS.

It’s another thing to take a photo during a newscast on an assault…

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In the last edition, I shared some photos that had a superimposed “bedroom” or “living” in the picture.

Those were a joke.  But at least they were in typed font.

What the hell is this?

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This listing features nothing but blurry photos, save for the first one, which they stole from MLS:

You can’t make this stuff up!

This is what each photo looks like up close:

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At first glance, there’s not much wrong with this one, right:

I mean, the “lake view” isn’t much to write home about.

But once you get into the actual listing, you realize that the “feature photo” is actually of your neighbour’s terrace, not yours:

In fact, this unit has no outdoor space!

This photo is presumably included because it showcases this glimmer of the lake, but the only way you can see it is if you stare directly out at your neighbours…

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This listing has twenty-seven photos!

And what did they choose for the “feature photo,” you ask?

This:

That’s a sideways photo of a shower.

And in case you’re wondering, not all the photos were sideways.

Only twenty-six were sideways.  They gone one photo of the kitchen to display correctly…

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Another feature photo here shows………a showerhead?

You know the property sucks when the feature photo is of a showerhead…

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Have we really not learned what “thumbnail” photos are by now?

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Not every upgrade in your house or condo is going to net you a dollar-for-dollar return on investment:

Maybe I’m just out of touch, but, um, who cares?

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Is this supposed to mean what I think it does?

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This is really cool:

Oh, wait.

There’s no real way to show what I’m talking about….

….unless…..we……ah, here:

Kind of reminds me of this:

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If you’ve got an unfinished room in the basement of your Richmond Hill or Markham sub-division home, and you use it to hit the heavy-bag while also hitting beer-bongs, you don’t need to take a photo for MLS when it comes time to sell…

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Did the photographer trip and fall and then take this photo, from behind two couches?

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Last, but certainly not least, this basement man cave was emailed to me by two people who know me quite well:

Back in the day, we converted part of my garage to a room where we would routinely get up to no good.

I dove deep into the archives, circa 2003, to find this one:

The wall in the “dojo” was legendary when I was in my youth.

Each bottle was a story, and the shelves were a timeline.  I mean, the fact that “Tornado” was the sixth bottle on the wall, and the presence of “Vex” and “Mike’s Hard” demonstrates my lack of desire to drink beer at age-19, and that “coolers” were all the rage.

The crazy thing is: when we sold the house and packed up “the dojo” in 2005, I kept all these bottles.  I put them in Chiquita Banana boxes from Loblaws and shoved them in my mother’s basement where they’ve remained for almost two decades.

When a friend emailed me the photo above of that man-cave above, he actually asked me, “Are these yours?”

Man, that was a moment in time.

Spanning back to more than half my life ago, I remain amazed that a grown man somewhere in the central core of Toronto has taken what my immature friends and I did in our late-teens and early-20’s, and made it a design feature in his multi-million-dollar house!

I don’t know whether to be bewildered or envious.

Can I be both? 🙂

Year-end posts are coming next week.

Have a great weekend, everybody!