Baby Jane
Bette Davis as Jane, in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”
Be careful what you say you will never do. Coming from a family of real estate agents, brokers, builders, and developers, I swore and I would never be a real estate agent. Two decades later, I am a broker and co-owner of my own real estate brokerage. The reason I never wanted to be a real estate agent is because I never wanted to be in sales. And honestly, I’m still not crazy about sales. What I love about my job is people and negotiating. Those are also the two things that make my job a nightmare at times.
People, as anyone who has worked anywhere can tell you, are crazy. Some are just low grade neurotic. I’m one of those people. OK, maybe more mid-grade neurotic, but stil. Some are “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” full on crazy. Most of the ones on this end of the spectrum are walking around, getting married, having children, coming into your store, and buying homes with no professional diagnosis and no plan of ever getting one. They walk among us.
The scariest thing is that you can’t always tell the difference between normal neurotics and Baby Janes. And when you are in real estate, even if you do, you may still have to help Baby Jane negotiate her home inspection repairs.
And unlike waiting on those people at a restaurant or talking to them on a customer service line, we are stuck with the real crazies for a minimum of 30 days, if not longer. Sometimes, we get lucky and they do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: they fire us.
These firings seem horrible at first, especially as a new agent when you don’t realize that some money just isn’t worth it. I remember every one of these firings even while I forget some of the nicest clients I’ve ever worked with. Nice clients don’t leave scars.
One of the first people who ever fired me wasn’t even the owner of the home I was listing. It was a situation where the father owned the home and his adult daughter was living there because she had fibromyalgia.
A side note here: I am not a medical professional, but every person I have ever worked with who told me in our first meeting that they have fibromyalgia has been completely insane. I’m not saying that fibromyalgia is not a real, debilitating disease. I’m saying that people who immediately want to talk about it may have a problem. Also, crazy people dig me.
Anyway, the daughter who lived in this house really had the fibromyalgia. I went to meet her and her father at the house on a brutally hot summer day. I had picked the listing up off a floor duty call (I now know this to be a red flag) and as I hadn’t had many listings, I put on a suit to try to “dress to impress” as we were taught as baby agents.
The first thing the father said to me was, “You can’t be that smart if you’re wearing a suit in this heat,” and I probably should have just gotten in my car and left, but commission checks don’t grow on trees, so I stayed and literally sweated it out.
The house was a nothing spectacular two story in a mid 90s subdivision, the worst decade for building, in my opinion. Three things stood out about it, however: it had the hottest pink shutters I had ever seen, the backyard was a tiny wedge on a 45 degree angle, and the inside had not been remodeled since the Kountry Kitchen phase of the Clinton administration. Pale pink and blue wallpaper with teddy bears on it adorned the kitchen walls and much of the upstairs, with pale pink and blue paint to match elsewhere.
At the time, we were still in a pretty good sellers’ market before the crash in 2008 and I felt good about the prospects of selling even this time capsule of a home. The father made it clear that he was not updating anything, and was adamant that the wallpaper was not going to be a deterrent to sales. I pulled comparable sales and we set a price together.
The daughter, we’ll call her Jane (see what I did there?), was a Level 2 hoarder and was in the process, she told me, of getting ready to have a yard sale to clear an immense amount of clutter out of the home. She was supposedly moving because she couldn’t negotiate the stairs well with her illness, but I think it had more to do with the house being paid for and her dad wanting to cash out. At any rate, all of her stuff had to go, as it would not fit in a smaller space.
As she showed me her garage full of junk, I started to make a comment about repainting the hot pink shutters, when Jane asked me what I thought of the new paint on the shutters. Wasn’t it just beautiful? Again, I was speechless. Who picked out a color like that? Crazy people, that’s who.
And so, a few weeks later, after I took pictures with a digital camera that had to be connected to a computer with a cord to transfer pictures, I got that bad boy on the market, and sat back and waited for my sweet commission check.
Things weren’t so bad at first. We had two or three showing requests and I took that as a good sign. However, Jane refused all of them, citing health issues. I fielded angry phone calls from fellow agents who wanted to know why they couldn’t get in this brand new listing and I had to tell them the owner was “sick.” I decided to go ahead and schedule an open house, as that was part of my original marketing plan with Jane and her father. I confirmed this with Jane for the following Sunday.
I arrived at the open house, suit on, cookies in hand, to find that Jane was still home and her adult son was asleep on the couch. It was 1:40 pm and the open house was scheduled for 2 pm. This was not looking good. It soon became clear that Jane was in no hurry, nor did she intend to prod her son into action. I went about my business, setting out cookies and flyers and sweating bullets that they would get out of the house in time.
Jane, however, was very angry and very vocal about it. She was on her PERIOD, and her BOYFRIEND thought it would be a good idea to go HORSEBACK RIDING. Was he an IDIOT? She was having the WORST cramps of her life. She espoused all of this as she went up and down the stairs (without issue, I might add) slamming doors and trying to get ready. Her son continued to sleep on the couch, seemingly unaffected by all of this hooting and hollering.
About five minutes to two, the first people came to the door, and not knowing what else to do, I let them in. Soon there were 10-12 people in the house. This finally got the son upright on the couch, but not out from underneath his afghan. With about 6 people in the kitchen, Jane entered the kitchen and announced, “I have already bled through two jumbo tampons and a pad and he STILL wants to go horseback riding.”
Time stood still for a bit. I looked at the open house guests and they looked back at me. Yes, we had all heard that. Jane, noticing us looking at each other, said something like, “What, you’ve never heard a grown woman talk about her period before?” I don’t know that some of them had.
Jane did leave, somewhere around 3 o’clock, after running off a whole lot of potential buyers.
What little feedback I could get, when Jane wasn’t using the kitchen as an impromptu stage for her personal drama, was that the wallpaper, shutters, and yard were deal killers.
I repeated all of this back to Jane’s father when he called me immediately after the open house.
“That’s ridiculous. If people like the house, they can just make an offer and strip the wallpaper. It won’t kill them.”
I tried to explain that the wallpaper was preventing them from making an offer and he told me that was my problem to deal with.
One week in and things were going great.
The following week, we had a few more showing requests and Jane allowed one of them. The feedback was the same as the open house: too much wallpaper, not enough yard.
At one point during the week, Jane canceled showings for a whole day because her toilet got clogged. She asked me to come over after the plumber had left and being a good baby agent, I went. It turned out she just wanted to complain about the plumber.
“He had the nerve to ask me what kind of toilet paper I use. Can you believe that? He said whatever it is, it’s too thick, that it’s like I’m trying to flush paper towels. What kind of stupid shit is that?”
I did not, in fact, know what kind of stupid shit that was. Looking down, so I didn’t have to look at her angry red face, I thought, “At least these wood floors are pretty.”
She then told me that it would be at least another day before she could show the house because this had really caused her fibromyalgia to flare up and she was exhausted. The fact that she always looked and acted like she had just snorted Adderall was not something I was going to mention.
Fast forward to the next day when her father calls me to ask why his house hasn’t sold. I told him, quite honestly, that out of 8 requested showings, his daughter had only allowed two. “I can’t really sell a house that I can’t show.” He was mad, and told me he would call his daughter to “straighten this out.”
I honestly didn’t think much of the call. I guess I thought he was used to his daughter’s condition and temperament. I guessed very wrong. I got out of an evening yoga class to a voicemail from the daughter.
“Listen here, bitch. You have ruined my son’s birthday, do you understand me? How DARE you tell my father I wasn’t allowing showings? I COULDN’T show the house because I was SICK and that is NONE OF HIS BUSINESS. This was the ONLY day I was going to have with my child and it’s ruined and I hope you’re happy, because you’re a BITCH.”
First of all, it was 100% her father’s business. He was the client, the one who had signed the paperwork. Second, I ruin a lot of things, but I don’t think this was one of them. Finally, I broke out in a cold sweat because this was my first truly crazy person voicemail while in real estate and it scared the shit out of me.
I should pause here to say that I have this panicked sweaty reaction to anyone who remotely reminds me of my mother’s irrational behavior. People who will leave a voicemail like this are capable of pretty much anything, and that terrifies me. Not many people push this button on me, but I have learned over the years that when they do, I need to back the hell up.
After taking a moment to panic, I immediately called my broker. He was busy, and so I paced my house, still sweating through my clothes because that is what I do when I’m stressed. I didn’t have any real estate friends to call and my husband, God love him, defaults to “Fuck that bitch!” whenever anyone acts bad around me, which, while thoughtful of me and protective, isn’t always helpful.
My broker finally called back and I explained what happened. “First of all,” he said, “Nobody talks to you like that.”
I had thought he was going to yell at me and instead he told me that nobody puts Baby in the corner! I was elated. Then he said, “But you’re probably going to have to give this listing to another agent.
Here’s where I was crazy, because, believe it or not, I was slightly bummed by that. I want to do a good job and sell more than everyone else and those are qualities that have helped me be a good agent. However, they have also kept me in bad situations for way too long. This was someone doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself: kiss the crazy goodbye.
After I let it sink in that I was losing my only listing, I was relieved. I also realized that I couldn’t sell that house because that woman did not want that house to sell. This was my first lesson in lack of motivation: any time I want the sale to happen more than the client (or in this case the client’s crazy daughter), something is very wrong.
Luckily for me, I didn’t even have to quit, as the daughter called my broker the next day to fire me. She didn’t know that I didn’t care by now, and that was fine with me. Mostly, I just never wanted to see her again. The agent who took over the listing called me to ask what had happened and I told her and wished her luck. She was going to need it.
I checked on the house several times for the next few years, but it never sold in that time, and finally I had bigger fish to fry than to worry about it.
I did wind up seeing Jane one last time in the grocery store. She was on the phone, pushing a cart and not paying attention to where she was going, and almost crashed into me. She was already angry and yelled something at me, but didn’t appear to recognize me. I got the sweats and left my cart where it was. I would rather have starved than deal with her.
To this day, if I mention this woman to my husband by saying, “Remember that crazy lady with fibromyalgia,” he knows exactly who I’m talking about, but if I run into any of the nice clients I worked with at the time he says, “Why didn’t you ever tell me about them?” Because there was really nothing to tell. Sane people, sadly, don’t make for very good stories.
