"It Isn't Usually This Messy"

In last week’s post, I detailed my first experience of dabbling in real estate. My two friends and I had been so successful (we thought) in this outing, that only a few months later we bought another property.

We had even less cash to work with this time around, so we looked at some really frightening houses. I remember in particular one crisp winter day when we met our real estate agent in front of a rickety old house in a rather dodgy neighborhood. The listing printout he had given us said that the house was priced at $27,000 – about half of what we had spent on our first house. This was in 1992, but even then this was a ridiculously low price for a house.

The house didn’t look like much, and the neighborhood wasn’t great, but how bad could it be? As we walked up to the front door, the agent added that this price “also includes the house next door.” Clearly we had either stumbled upon the bargain of the century or some sort of gateway to Hades.

It turned out to be the latter. We were greeted at the door by a three hundred pound woman with a full beard. I’m not talking five o’clock shadow here; I mean a freaking beard. I honestly thought it was a man at first, and even after I heard a woman’s voice come out of her mouth, I wasn’t 100% certain. Gender propaganda aside, the fact is that when you meet someone, your mind wants to put them into one of two categories: male or female. Some biologically male persons decide to dress and act like females, and vice versa, and often it isn’t that difficult to overcome your mind’s initial inclination and shove them into their preferred slot (so to speak). But it’s an entirely different experience to encounter someone whose body and mind seem to be in total accord that they are going to wholeheartedly straddle the gender fence. Her body was so large and amorphous that it offered no clues as to what combination of chromosomes it was harboring. Her pale blond hair was long, but thin and ratty, and although her facial features seemed finer than a man’s, they were camouflaged by her jowls and a good inch of unkempt facial hair. I kept wanting to think of her as a man, but every time she spoke I was jarred by that unmistakably female voice.

She hurriedly explained, as she let us into the house, that “it isn’t usually this messy.” By this, she evidently meant that she hadn’t had time to clean much since the Nixon administration. The floors were hardwood – a fact that I surmised from the fact that there was a roughly two foot diameter circle of visible hardwood flooring in the middle of the room. She had apparently started mopping about forty-five seconds before we arrived, because this spot was still damp and next to it stood a bucket of filthy water with a mop in it. The rest of the floor was entirely covered by a layer of dirt so thick that might have concealed a map indicating the location of the Well of Souls for all we knew.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. One half of the living room was taken up by a massive, chaotic pile of furniture, appliances, and other odds and ends. If you remember the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Richard Dreyfuss goes nuts and builds Devil’s Tower in his living room, you have a pretty good idea what I’m talking about. Except that the tower was a pile leaning against the far wall, so that it was more like Devil’s Landfill.

In truth, we could have bought the place (and the house next door!), spent a few months cleaning it up, and probably made a healthy profit on the rental income over the next few years. But we weren’t interested in putting in honest labor in exchange for a fair profit. We wanted easy money with no sacrifice. And frankly we weren’t sure that the bottom layer of that pile wasn’t made of human skulls. After a whirlwind tour through the House of Horrors, we went home and took showers.

Despite these brushes with the ugly side of home ownership, Wade, Brent and I became convinced that we were going to be real estate moguls. Salaried jobs were for suckers, we told ourselves. We were going to buy houses for a song, recoup our money in rental income over the next few months, and then buy more houses. We’d be millionaires in five years.

To facilitate this process, I decided to become a licensed Realtor. This would give me access to the Multiple Listing Service, which would allow me to find properties without going through another Realtor. In fact, I could actually earn a commission on houses that we were buying, which would allow me to make my share of the down payment without fronting any cash myself. Additionally, while we were waiting for millionaire status to kick in, I could make ends meet by selling houses.

In actuality, the notion of me selling houses would be comical to anyone who has ever met me. I was surly, introverted, smug and sarcastic, on top of which I didn’t like getting dressed up and detested paperwork. In other words, I was about as far as one could get from the archetype of the smiling, helpful salesperson. But this is another side effect of depression: when just getting out of bed in the morning is painful, your perception of your choices becomes a bit warped. When you’re trying to decide if you want to be a lawyer or a real estate agent, it’s like somebody is asking you whether you’d rather be hit on the head with a ball peen hammer or a golf club. Gosh, Alex, if those are my choices, I’ll take the hammer.

I dutifully sat through two weeks of Realtor training, which was a jarring experience for someone who had just graduated from college with a philosophy degree. In the field of philosophy, splitting hairs is actually a good thing. In fact, your professor is more likely to mark you down for insufficiently distinguishing two nearly identical concepts than to criticize you for being argumentative and pedantic. Argumentative and pedantic are like first and second base to a philosophy major. Then you get out in the real world and try to apply these “skills,” and you are met with people who glare at you and growl, “You know what I mean.”

Case in point: the instructor of this Realtor training class made a point to distinguish between two types of property: there was real property, he said, and personal property. Real property consists of the land, any structures on it, and any personal property affixed to the land or a structure. Personal property, he told us, was essentially anything else.

That explanation will make perfect sense to about ninety-seven percent of the people reading this. The other three percent are philosophy students, lawyers, and other pedantic asswipes (like me).

The problem is that he has defined personal property as something that is both completely distinct from real property and as something that sometimes overlaps with real property. What he should have said is that if you take a piece of personal property and nail it to a wall in your house, it stops being personal property and becomes real property.

I took it upon myself to point out the ambiguity in his definition. “You said there’s no overlap between personal property and real property, right?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Then,” I went on, “the statement ‘personal property that is affixed to a structure is real property’ is false.”

“No, it isn’t,” he replied, clearly irritated to have some college kid splitting hairs with his lecture.

“Yes, it is,” I insisted. “You said that no personal property is real property, but then you set up a condition where some personal property is real property. If you take out the modifying phrase ‘that is affixed to a structure,’ you are left with ‘personal property… is real property.’” Q.E.D., I thought.

He stared at me for a moment like he suspected I had been hit on the head with a ball peen hammer. “Then don’t do that,” he replied.

The class erupted in laughter. I had unwittingly been his straight man, like the guy who goes to his doctor saying “It hurts when I do this.”

Then don’t do that.

This was the first indication I experienced that my college education had actually made me less suited for real world employment. And the training was the easy part. Once I had received my certification, I was assigned a cubicle at a local Coldwell Banker office and told to start cold calling my friends and relatives to let them know I was available if they were in the market to buy a house. Who the hell would call me if they wanted to buy a house? I thought. I walked out, realizing I wasn’t going to be selling any houses.

Wade, Brent and I ended up buying a “four-plex” – a two story building with two symmetrical apartments on each level. The apartments were already leased, and the total rent was about equivalent to our mortgage payment. We figured we’d raise the rent by five percent right away and start making some money. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

Two of our tenants immediately stopped paying their rent. We had been used to dealing with tenants who were responsible, middle-class students, not the professional poor. The tenants sensed our naiveté and decided to take advantage of us. Thus began a crash course in tenant rights versus landlord rights, consisting almost solely of the harsh truth that tenants can do pretty much whatever the fuck they want. The only recourse a landlord has is eviction, which can take months. In the meantime, the tenant can live for free, punch holes in walls and build the Devil’s Middle Finger in their living room if they feel like it.

To make matters worse, things were constantly breaking at this place, so we’d have been losing money even if we could have gotten the tenants to pay their rent. I ended up being about $1500 in debt to the partnership, and one day Wade and Brent offered to “buy me out” – for $1500. I gladly agreed, walking away with nothing but a sense of profound relief.