Four photographs from a day spent looking at houses: Two of them are tragic — but the other two are infuriating

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m working this weekend with an out-of-state investor. I don’t know that Phoenix has hit the bottom in what is the ninth quarter of declining home prices, but we’ve shed enough value that newer suburban tract homes can once again throw off positive cash flow as rental properties.

That’s the happy news. The sad news is that many of the houses that seem to be attractively priced to investors are in some stage of the foreclosure process, from negative equity to short sales to lender-owned properties.

If you do this job long enough, you see just about everything. If you’re good at drawing inferences from artifacts, you can figure out the story of the home life in just about any house — family structure, recent financial history, reason for moving — whether or not the survival machine that is a home is functioning properly.

But in a normal market, in a normal time, in a normal neighborhood, the tragic stories don’t come so thick and fast. Who hasn’t seen a skip? Who hasn’t seen an eviction? Who hasn’t seen the sad tell-tales of divorce? But it’s a rare thing to see these awful signs twelve or fifteen times in a single day.

Look at this:

I saw kids’ bikes left behind in several garages today. Not enough room on the pick-up truck, the truck packed to bursting with everything the family could carry. Children are so easy to hustle. I can hear the fake enthusiasm behind the lie: “We’ll get new bikes! Better bikes! You’ll see!”

That’s sad, but it was those ceiling valences that got me, those fabric clouds in a girl kid’s sky. That’s a mother-daughter thing — “What can we do to make this your room?” Not too much money to spend, but just the right touch, just the right expression of a budding young lady’s individuality. Abandoned in the rush to get gone. Will that little girl ever be able to look at a ceiling and not miss those fabric clouds?

I see this all the time, and I never get over it. That’s a man trying to kick down a door so he can beat up a woman. In this particular case, the poor woman was trapped in the walk-in closet, nowhere else to run. I don’t absolve the woman — why did she get involved with a jackass? — why didn’t she learn self-defense? — but I damn the man sight-unseen, in perpetuity.

And while we’re about it, let’s condemn the listing agent, too, for not replacing a $20 door. All of the houses I saw today were horribly serviced, by our standards. Filthy, in palpable disrepair. Desperately in need of touch-up painting, at a minimum — and many needed new paint, new flooring and all-new kitchen appliances. Every single house was festooned with thick weeds — in the front yard.

My presumption is that every one of these listing agents is getting paid — or would get paid if the houses ever sold. But I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would expect any of these houses to sell — at least not without slashing prices to absurdly low levels.

Oh. Right.

This photos says it all for me. Five minutes with a vacuum cleaner, and I would know nothing about this harbinger of neglect. I’m sure the listing agent is well-schooled in the art of pissing and moaning about the lousy real estate market, but five minutes of easy effort to protect the seller’s investment — even if the seller was too lazy to look out for himself — is just too much work.

This picture is my favorite, though:

How long has it been since the listing agent serviced this home? The sparkly thing at the top of the door says “Merry Christmas.” Why hasn’t this house been taken over by crack-heads? Because there aren’t enough crack-heads to go around…

I feel very bad for the people who lost their houses. And I wish it were not so easy for me to figure out what happened to them. But I despise the kind of Realtors who would take on listings like these and then do nothing at all to preserve the value of the asset.

I don’t believe in god and I don’t pray, but tonight I’m going to make an exception. I’ll say a prayer — to who knows what — for the little boys who lost their bikes and for a little girl who lost her fabric clouds. I’ll pray for the women who love men who sometimes hate them, and for the men who hate themselves too much to love their women. But my deepest, most profound, most sincere prayer will be for listing agents like those whose efforts I encountered today.

I will pray, with every bit of solemnity I have within me, that this thing we are doing, this Holy Church of Excellence, will at last put every lazy Realtor into a line of work he or she can actually do. Justice in the economy can be disruptive in the short-run. But, in the long-run, everybody wins.

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