I did not want to leave two stars for a realtor because I can imagine how much they rely on their reviews, therefore I'm leaving three. However, I do want to comment on my experience. My husband and I had our home listed in Southern California over the summer, and she was a realtor that brought us an offer. She was not the listing agent. The offer was above asking price and we had another offer already from the prior week that was barely just below our asking price. It was decided that we would go with Samantha's client because she was several thousand more and after looking into it, she seemed to have the stronger portfolio financially to handle the loan.
Well, all seemed rosy until inspection day when Samantha and her assistant came out to our home and their home inspector that they work with on a regular basis showed up and started picking our house to shreds. I got a strange feeling when after two hours he was just getting started. Our listing broker stopped by after a while and I told him I thought something seemed off because we had purchased our home three years prior and it passed everything inspection -wise totally fine! After 3 1/2 hrs the guy was still finding every square inch of the place with something seemingly wrong or askew and was pointing stuff out to me as well, and I was starting to get some bad vibes about the whole thing.
I discussed it with our broker and with my husband but since our broker only stayed a short time, they thought I may have been just overly nervous.
I even voiced my concerns to her assistant & she told me "we pay him very well so yes he does an extremely thorough job." hmm.
Well their inspector went on to bring a pool guy, a heating/air conditioning guy, a plumber and and so forth to FURTHER inspect certain areas of the house and basically it was a case of looking beyond the normal wear and tear and scrutinizing it AS IF this 1975 house was just-built, new construction. I mean, c'mon.
Later, my anxieties turned out to be valid. After having one after another pro come in and fine-tooth comb our 40 yr. old house, the buyer decides to ask us for over $32K dollars in credit. On a house that passed inspection three yrs. prior w/ 3K worth of repairs no problem?? what? There was a valid credit for termite work and treatment and also for a couple of other things, all amounting to about 3-4K. So we countered and of course, she cancelled Escrow.
I went back to a conversation I had with the agent Samantha the day of that inspection and remembered she had told me that her buyer (the one that cancelled escrow) had purchased other properties with her over the last few years so I remembered I wondered why a few properties were bought in such a short period of time? Well it isn't illegal to buy and sell and make a profit but what is improper is offering enough over asking price to clear the way for you to have your offer accepted, only to turn around and have your highly expensive Inspector come out and rip the sellers home apart to justify asking for thousands upon thousands of credit and put the sellers in a bad predicament (esp. when the need to move to the relocation area needs to happen quickly)! Then guess what? The few thousand over asking becomes tens of thousands in loss for the seller after the over zealous inspection and credit requests are paid!
I can imagine some people in desperation have caved to this buyer's jacked up credit demands, We were fortunate to go back to our initial offer of just-below asking price and all went perfectly as expected but without them it would've been starting from square one.
When this happened I was rmore than a little upset. I promised myself I would let the dust settle (and my anger) and try to gain perspective on it and not go after someone's character seeing as I'm sure she is a hard working lady. However, this client that she has done deals with in the past that tried to purchase our home and took us for some naive' ignoramuses is not playing fair and square in her real estate dealings and maybe other homeowners need to be aware that these kinds of trumped up inspections happen. I'm sure Samantha has had many great buyers as clients. I don't think this woman was one of them, and I think she would do well to distance herself from this client. It was not "on the level" no matter which way you look at it. I have many friends, neighbor's and some are in real estate and they have all told me this client of hers straight-up tried to scam us. Thank god for back-up offers is all I can say! read more