Sad Dad

Like most good real estate agents, I send Christmas cards out to past clients. Sometimes those cards get returned for various reasons, but the most common reason is that my former client went and sold their house without me. This is not a happy thing to find out, but it happens and I adjust my mailing list accordingly. Usually the bounce backs are not a surprise, as they were people I never got along with very well or who just seemed generally shady during the home buying process. 

One January day I was cleaning out my overflowing mailbox at work when I saw a bounce back that did surprise me. The owner of this home had been one of the saddest and most fastidious people I had ever met. I called him Sad Dad. 

Sad Dad found me, not through a referral or social media or even Google, but by researching buyers agents and reading that agents with an ABR, or Accredited Buyer Representative designation, were the best agents to hire. I just happened to have my ABR designation at the time. 

As an aside, the majority of these real estate designations are essentially meaningless and I have since let mine lapse. They are yet another way for third parties to profit off of real estate agents. The process goes a little something like this: agent pays for designation class or classes and then agent pays dues every year for the honor of having said designation initials after their name, even though the general public has no idea what GRI, SRS, or SRES mean. There are some exceptions to this, but suffice it to say that if there is a way to profit off of real estate agents, someone has thought of it. 

So Sad Dad went to the ABR website and that’s how I came to be staring at this bounced back Christmas card about three years later. He was the only lead I ever got as a direct result of having that designation and, as such, I guess the thing paid for itself. 

Even without that particular honor, Sad Dad was memorable simply because of his sadness. When we first met and started looking at homes he talked about nothing except his divorce and his kids, who did not like to visit him at the apartment he currently lived in. He was insistent on finding a house that his kids would love. 

To this end, he brought a football to every showing, so that he could test out how well he and his son would be able to play catch. I was the substitute son in these scenarios, even though I could hardly catch anything. He also insisted on finding a house with a neighborhood pool. Between finding a flat back yard in East Tennessee and the pool thing, our options were severely limited. 

Luckily for Sad Dad, he was house shopping in a buyer’s market, not long after the Great Housing Crash of 2008. At that time we had roughly 20 months worth of housing supply, over three times the supply in a healthy market. In other words, there were a lot more sellers than buyers and my client had a whole lot to choose from.  

While looking at around thirty different listings with Sad Dad, I heard a lot about his divorce. He was a totally defeated man, hunched over, almost disappearing into his ill fitting clothes that must have fit him when he was 30 pounds heavier. Due to the level of his sadness and sometimes anger at his ex-wife, I assumed for weeks that his divorce had been very recent. In fact, I was shocked when he told a neighbor one day that he had been divorced five years.  Five years.

Now, I know every divorce is hard, especially when children are involved, but I also know that time heals all wounds and half a fucking decade is a lot of time to get your shit together. As far this guy was concerned, his wounds were fresh and the divorce had happened yesterday. No wonder he was a hunched over Sad Dad. 

I don’t mean that he wasn’t nice, because he was and he was very considerate of my time, which is a lot more than I can say for a lot of clients. It was simply hard to watch someone suffer so much over something that had happened so many years ago. 

SD finally found a house that met all of his criteria: flat back yard (football thrown to prove it), neighborhood pool within easy walking distance of house (walking distance timed to make sure), and two bedrooms upstairs with a shared bathroom for his kids. What wasn’t perfect about the house was its location and condition. It faced a busy, double yellow lined road that no amount of Leland Cypresses could mask and on the other side of that road were some railroad tracks. The first time I heard the train go by while I was in the purple sparkle painted master bedroom, I thought it was coming straight through the house. This, nor the paint colors deterred SD, as he was sure this was the home that would make his children want to stay with him and therefore make their mother and his ex-wife mad with jealousy. 

I tried to talk him through some of these downsides, especially with regards to resale, but he couldn’t be swayed. This, he said, was the house he would live in forever. This was his dream home. 

Which begs the question of why his Christmas card to said dream home bounced back to me just a few years later. Suzy Drew was quickly on the case. First I searched for his house in the MLS to see which agent he had cheated on me with, only to find...nothing. The house had not sold through the MLS. Having more tricks in my bag, I pulled up the tax records and saw that the most recent buyer of the house was his mortgage company, meaning that Sad Dad was now Foreclosed Dad. 

This, however, made absolutely no sense. SD had been an accountant, a licensed CPA who was thorough enough to research accredited buyer’s representatives and hire a home inspector who took over four hours to complete an inspection on a 1500 sq ft house on a slab. A man who bought about half as much house as he qualified for because he didn’t want to be house poor.  In other words, this was not a man who got behind on his house payments. 

So back to me, sitting in my office with the returned Christmas card in front of my laptop. Wondering what on earth could be going on, I did something that I should do a lot more often, I opened up the Google machine and googled Sad Dad. I don’t know what I was expecting but it certainly was not a mugshot of him in a black and white striped jumpsuit. Honestly, my first thought was that he had killed his wife. I mean, it wasn’t a stretch. What I read in a year old article was even more bizarre. 

Sad Dad, in his capacity as a CPA for a government entity, had invented a charity and then written a check to that charity –which was essentially him – and cashed it. It was like the dumbest crime of the century. Even I knew, with my limited accounting skills, that there was almost no way to not get caught for doing something that obvious. But then I thought, well maybe it was for a ton of money and he left the country, right?

Wrong. SD had traded it all in for $50,000. I’m not saying $50,000 is not a lot of money, but it’s not going to prison money, at least for me. I have put a lot of thought into this over the years since I read his story and I think my number is definitely in the 7 figures. I would need enough money to get a new identity and then get to a non-extradition country. Sad Dad should have watched more Dateline. 

The saddest part about this Sad Dad story is that he would now likely never see his children again as children, as he was going to be doing about 20 years with no possibility of parole. And he had done this not long after he bought the house where he would play catch with his kids and spend gleeful summers with them at the neighborhood pool. 

Which lead me to the next question of why, Sad Dad, why? I still don’t have a good answer to this and I’ve thought about it a lot. SD was not my only client to go to prison, but it’s a pretty short list and he definitely wins the “Least Likely to Go to Prison” award of my career. One thought is that he felt entitled to the money. He clearly had some sort of victim complex regarding his divorce and custody situation, so maybe he had the same thing going on professionally. But that still didn’t explain the relatively small amount of embezzled cash. My only answer there was that he thought he could get away with literally signing his own checks for a long time, but that didn’t make a lot of sense either. If this was a long con, and SD in no way seemed the long con type and I know because I am related to a lot of them, the charity would have been harder to trace and he would have written numerous smaller checks that wouldn’t be as noticeable. 

Sometimes I wonder if he wanted to use that money to do something for his kids: a lavish Disney vacation or cruise. I can’t imagine him blowing it all on detailing his Honda or 100 new pairs of ill fitting Dockers. This man was no playa. 

At the end of the day, I think he was a man who just had a lot of pain and nowhere to put it. Instead of going to therapy or doing yoga, he stole money from his job. I used to drive by his old house a lot and I would think of him in prison. Ultimately, I don’t know how he could have truly cared for his kids and done what he had done, but who am I to say what goes on in someone’s head, much less a parent’s. 

I printed his mugshot out and hung it on my cork board, somewhat as a joke, but also as a reminder that when things don’t go your way, and you feel like the whole world is against you, stealing $50,000 probably won’t help. But $5,000,000 might.