Breaking up is hard to do

If you are a loyal reader of my blog (and really, who isn’t?) you know that we have been thinking about putting our house on the market and trying to find something bigger.  We have been scouring the market, (really, I think I have looked at every house in our price range online at least 3 times) and we have finally taken the plunge… almost. 

One of our neighbor’s is moving out of state and just listed their house, so I asked them who their agent was.  They told me and said that he has sold several of the houses in the neighborhood, so I gave him a call.  He came and looked at our house and gave us all the comparables  and told us what he thought we should list our house for.  I was a bit disappointed in the number, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was realistic for where the market is right now.  I also realized that the houses that we are looking at buying have come down in price way more than ours has, so hopefully it can even out.  When we left our meeting we told him that we didn’t want to sign any contracts yet, that we needed to think about it for a couple of days.

Well, Hubby wasn’t completely sold on using him as our agent, so our mortgage guy gave us the names of several agents that he recommends, and we gave one of them a call.  The other agent came and met with us, and told us about the same thing number wise, but offered a much better deal on his commissions.  Hubby wanted to go with the second guy.  I said that was fine since he could save us some money, but that meant that we had to call and tell the first guy that we weren’t going to go with him!  AAHH!!  Since I’m a marshmallow, I felt really bad that we were going to have to tell agent #1, “Thanks, but no thanks”.  #1 called several times the day we met with the agent #2, to see what we were going to do, and each time I didn’t answer.  I didn’t want to break the bad news to him.  I made Hubby answer one of the times and tell him. 

I think I’m over the break up now, because #1 did something that kind of annoyed me.  When we were first talking to him, he told us that he had some military people that were being transferred here that were coming in this weekend to look at houses that were in this price range.  He wanted to bring them by because he thought they would like the house.  After we broke the news to him, we told them that if he would like, he could still bring them by.  (there’s still a 3% commission for the buyers agent on the table!  He’d still be making money!)  He told us that if he did, he would want the full 6% for the buying and selling agent.  I may not know the proper realtor etiquette, but that ticked me off.  I thought why on earth should he get a full 6% for basically doing nothing?  He wouldn’t have done any advertising, or anything to try and sell our house.  We told him he could have 5%, but it still annoys me.  I guess breaking up is hard to do…until that person ticks you off.  Then good riddance!