Last week, my friend and fellow agent Jane, hurt her back. As of this writing, she is still laid up. With Jane out of commission, she asked me to help her client Shelly find a rental. So, I e-mailed Shelly, explaining who I was and why I was e-mailing her. I told her I was a bit late to the party, but so that I could appropriately help her, could she tell me what she was looking for (bedrooms, bathrooms, location, etc.?), any pets, her budget, when she wanted to move and were there any issues such as an eviction, conviction or bruised credit we needed to address upfront with a landlord.
Though these items may sound at the least mundane, and at the most intrusive, they are components of a bigger picture: what is a good fit (home-wise) for Shelly. I mean, if she has three dogs, and wants to live in Scottsdale, and has a budget of $1,200 a month, it might be a good idea to know this upfront, so that I can redirect her to more realistic expectations.
But Shelly, who must have read the same, "How to find a rental home through psychic vibes," article on Zillow that everyone else appears to read, spoon-fed me tid-bits at a maddening slow pace. She also wouldn't answer my calls, but insisted all communication must be by text. I tried e-mail, but after three days of e-mailing her at the same time ever day, all of the sudden her e-mail just, "didn't work."
Unfortunately, Shelly's answers to me (when she answered) were different than the same ones she shared with Jane a week earlier. For example, she told Jane she would be living with her boyfriend. She told me her sister. For Jane, Shelly had fabulous credit. For me, it might have a few teensy issues. For Jane, Shelly made $100k a year. For me she made $10 an hour and her sister was loaded. All of this took more time and patience than it should have on my part, because I didn't even know where to start looking for her because answers to questions such as, "What city do you wish to live in and what is your monthly rental budget?" went unanswered.
Finally, Shelley who must have been as sick of my questions as I was of asking them, sent me a list of homes she found on Zillow, demanding to look at that evening at 6 p.m. That's wonderful and everything but I wasn't sure I was available, and even if I was, it is dark at 6 p.m., so I needed to contact the agents to make sure the home was 1) available to show and 2) had the power on. But sadly, because this list didn't come from any source I use, all of the homes she sent me weren't even active. They were all old listings.
Shelly didn't believe me, because you know, Zillow is uuber-accurate. Apparently.
The biggest piece of information Shelly withheld was when did she need to move. Jane told me her lease expired on her current home at the end of January. Shelly refused to answer me at all (though I asked several times). That is a significant problem. There is no landlord in this market who will hold a home eight weeks. So if Shelly really wants to move at the end of January, we shouldn't even be looking now. If she needs to move this week, I need to find rental homes that are vacant and move-in ready. But Shelly never responded to this and I gave up. When I called Jane to give her an update, Jane agreed, it just didn't smell right. And at that point, I just decided I had spent enough time with Shelly and moved on.
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