September 27, 2004

I Hate People

So one component of our housing deal (added by the sellers) was that we had to get the house appraised in seven days after the opening of escrow. Our agent got a testy reminder from their agent's assistant this morning that tomorrow is the seventh day. Of course, they burned up a couple of those days by dragging their feet on getting completed versions of necessary paperwork, but no matter. They've established a pretty consistent pattern here; they can do whatever they want -- wait all day before calling us back, respond to 5 PM deadlines the following afternoon -- but we're expected to perform on demand.

On our side, our lender, E*Trade Mortgage, put in a "super rush" order for an appraisal on Thursday, and now ... nothing. I spoke with our E*Trade rep today, stressing that no, time really really was of the essence here, and she replied that she'd look into the matter, get on top of things -- all kinds of hard-charging, proactive sentiments -- and would call me back later in the day with a progress update. You guessed it -- she didn't call back! And now it's past five PM, and everybody's gone home for the day.

I'm beginning to suspect that the whole real-estate business runs on harvested anger and human misery. (And misspellings. So far I've yet to meet a real estate agent who can put more than two sentences in a row without egregiously misspelling something in at least one of them.)

Posted by Kevin at September 27, 2004 05:42 PM