Divorced? Depressed? Deceased? When you are selling your Sun City home, no one should be able to guess the state of your desperation.

I am every day aghast at a class of homes-for-sale that I have never seen before, nowhere but here in Sun City. I call them ‘throwaway’ homes, since this seems to be the essence of their marketing appeal: The net effect if not the conscious intent is to repel all but the most rapacious of all-cash investors.

Do you doubt me? Take the time to watch that slide show – until your heart breaks. Home after home, worst feet forward – and these are marketing photos, intended to entice buyers!

A Sun City home represents a lifetime of effort for its owners. And at every step of their residential history, those owners were fastidious about the husbandry of their wealth. Until the last step.

Is the home’s seller widowed or divorced – abruptly amputated from the place where we are most human? Or beset by diminishing health and rising expenses? Or has the owner expired without heirs?

Many throwaway homes fall into the last category – probate sales. There is literally no one to defend the homeowner’s equity – nor anyone to defend it for.

That justifies nothing. Whatever the seller’s state of mind – or state of desperation – this is none of the buyer’s business. The listing agent is being paid a substantial sum of money to obtain the best possible return on the seller’s investment, even if the seller is no longer with us. Neither the buyer nor the buyer’s agent should be able to tell, either from the listing or the home itself, what the seller is going through.

Nothing about the seller’s circumstances should be obvious to the buyer from the listing. It is literally the listing agent’s job to direct the seller toward the highest attainable return, and telegraphing desperation – or even just despair – achieves the opposite: It attracts only predators and makes them ravenous to inflict the greatest possible pain.

Moreover, the neighbors have not volunteered to have their own equity trashed because they made the mistake of living too near a throwaway home.

There can be no wolves without sheep, but the owner of real property should never be a sheep, not even post mortem: It is never an honest man’s job to talk the other guy into making a mistake. I would go further and say that it is incumbent upon a listing agent to make sure his seller, regardless of the circumstances, is not being fed to the wolves.