A Homeowner Fired His Shady Realtor and Sold the House Himself—Saving Thousands in the Process

Matthew Gilligan

1 hour ago

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I think that most of us would like to think that realtors have our best interests in mind…

And I’m sure that most of them do!

But, let’s be honest: there are shady people in every business, and real estate is no exception.

In today’s story, a man explained why he decided to take matters into his own hands after he realized his realtor was up to no good.

Let’s take a look!

Manipulative Buyers Got Greedy and Lost a Great House.

“We listed our house last November with the same realtor we used to buy the house with.

She was great as a buyers agent, very aggressive when finding a house for us.

Not so great when she was our seller agent.

It sounds like a nice house.

We listed at the low end of her appraisal range since it was November and the beginning of the slow season.

Our house was in superb condition, well kept and just a well built custom home with top of the line construction materials.

First weekend on the market we received an offer from a buyer (who did a second showing without making an appointment or letting us know), and we responded with a counter offer.

So…what’s the deal…?

Two days later we hadn’t heard anything so we texted our realtor to find out what was going on.

No response.

6 hours later we text again……no response.

8 pm my wife texts and asks if everything is ok?

Finally, a response.

9 pm the realtor responds with “Oh, they didn’t want to take the counter offer”.

No reasons given why they didn’t want to accept the counter offer, and her response was short, almost like we were bothering her even asking.

5 days later she calls and says the same buyers have a counter to our counter, to which we verbally agree to the terms.

We get the contract and as I’m reading through it, while docu-signing, I come to the inspection/repair addendum where it states that we will pay up to $2k in repairs on the septic and up to $2k in repairs on the well.

This was annoying…

This wasn’t verbally agreed upon, so this irritated us but we signed it anyways knowing that the well and septic were in top shape.

The inspections are completed, and 2 days after the inspection, my Ring camera alerts me to someone being in the driveway. I look and see a truck and trailer had backed into my driveway and 3 guys get out and put a ladder on my roof and start climbing on the roof.

Again, no appointment was made so I immediately thought squatters (since the property was vacant).

But he called the realtor to double check.

I called my realtor (who surprisingly answered) before calling the police just to be sure it wasn’t the buyer sending someone for another inspection.

The realtor says she wasn’t aware of anyone coming on the property so she called their realtor.

Their realtor took hours to get back to her, but in the meantime those guys ended up leaving so I never contacted the police.

Their realtor said the buyer sent someone out to do repair estimates. Again, we let it go because we just wanted to sell the house.

What a circus this was turning into!

Two days later we get a repair request and the inspection report. I looked at the inspection report, no major issues just a bunch of little things, and these buyers wanted $40k in repairs, with $25k for a new roof….that wasn’t even called out in the inspection! It’s an architectural shingle roof (30 year life) on a 20 year old house.

I had a roofer come out and look at it and said at least 10 more years life left, and a current replacement would be about $12.5k. Half what their friends quoted.

Turns out, these “contractors” were friends of theirs (as confirmed on Facebook) and said the roof had 2 years left at most. They also over priced all of the small items (nothing major found) listed in the repair request.

They weren’t willing to agree to pay for these repairs.

I’m all about negotiating, I know as a buyer you want the best deal and as a seller you want the most money, but when someone tries to manipulate negotiations to get more money out of the other party, that is bad business.

We told our our realtor we will do zero repairs and credit them $0.

Their realtor immediately asks if we would at least give them $5k to which we gave them the one finger salute.

Enough of this!

They terminated the contract, as expected, and we took the house off the market and fired our realtor. We were going to re-list in the spring when the market picked back up.

Fast forward to March, an old neighbor who moved out of state a few years ago contacted me and asked if we were still planning to sell.

We said we were just getting ready to list again in April, and they asked if we’d like to sell it to them without realtor involvement.

We said sure, and came to an agreement on a price.

That worked out well!

He used a real estate lawyer who also was a title company for the paperwork, and had all of his inspections completed again.

I had repaired most of the little things found in the last inspection, and the new inspections didn’t uncover anything new.

We just closed on Friday, I made more money than if I would have sold to the manipulative buyers, and everything went smoothly with no shady business.

Sometimes when one door closes, a bigger door opens.”

Check out what folks had to say about this on Reddit.

This person had a lot to say.