The Listing That Never Was

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me to list her rental home. There were a few caveats:

First, there are tenants in the home. The tenants have the right to quiet enjoyment, which means they have free reign of the home and only have to be marginally accommodating, per the lease. Prior to a showing the tenants don't have to clean, keep up the yard or cooperate in any way, other than to let me and potential clients in after a reasonable amount of notice is given. By the way, "a reasonable amount of notice" really means 2 days, but if the tenants are only available to accommodate between 5:56 a.m. and 5:57 a.m. on the third Tuesday of the month, it is what it is.

In addition, passive aggressive tenants can follow potential buyers around and unload as much hyperbolic truth as they desire at the potential buyers. "Yea, the owner said they would fix the toilet three years ago, but it really wasn't fixed very well." or "The owner is too cheap to do real repairs." or "I asked the owner to add a third garage bay so they did, but didn't get it permitted." Oddly enough, tenants just consider this friendly banter and aren't really thinking they are sabotaging their landlord's attempt to get a home sold.

Second the owners, partially out of loyalty and partly out of the need for funds, wanted to allow their long-term tenants to stay and only wanted to sell the home to an investor. That's all well and good, but that may not be the most reasonable solution. The owners could get much more money if they kicked the tenants out (their lease is up in May) and spiffed up the place a bit. However, that would mean nobody was making the mortgage payment for a few months. The owners didn't really like that scenario. So, the tenants could stay and I could sell the home to some other sucker landlord.

Third, the owners were in a situation where they might or might not break even. My clients were willing to pay me to handle the sale but no other agent could be involved, so they didn't have to pay more of a commission than necessary. In other words, the home wasn't going on the Multiple Listing Service--which attaches to every real estate Web site in the world. Instead, the owners hired me to just find someone through smoke signals and Craigslist. The tenants also refusing to have the address posted on social media and refusing to have my sign in the yard only added to this nightmare scenario.

Truthfully, I lived this headache more times than I want to admit. I totally understand my client's conflicted nature. Good tenants who pay are hard to come by. Empty homes come with liabilities. In the end, my folks cancelled the listing before I had a chance to spend a few hundred on advertising (I was in the process). Sometimes it is better to hold on to what we have and wait for the right opportunity to present itself. But, even I could see this wasn't the right time.