I began looking in the newspaper every Sunday, went to open houses, and called tons of agents. At one point, I had about ten different realtors trying to help me. However, when they discovered how little I could afford - which meant little commission for them - their interest rapidly waned. I dropped a few of the more obvious ones for this reason. The others drifted away, one by one.
The problem was, I didn't really like anything I saw, and the houses I did like always had some fault. For example, either the basement was too wet, or the windows were out of line, which meant the house was leaning, etc., etc. My hopes were raised and dashed many times, as were those of my more faithful agents. The realtors only had so much stamina, and then they were gone.
Emotionally, this was a very trying time for me. I'm a very softhearted person, and it distressed me greatly to see an agent become all excited about a house he was positive would be ideal for me, and then to watch the defeated expression come into his eyes when I found a fault, or simply didn't like it. Sometimes I was tempted to just buy the house so I could make his day.
One day I noticed an ad in the paper for Many Low-Priced Houses Available. I called the number listed in the ad and discovered it belonged to an outfit called the Bargain Registry. The young-sounding gentleman on the other end of the phone gave me a long spiel on what the company was about, a lot of which I didn't understand because he spoke in realtorese. It sounded as if it might be worth investigating, however, so I made an appointment for the next day, and took my stepfather, Wim, along for protection.
Enter Gershwin. To this day he has left an indelible impression.
Gershwin was a short, slightly rotund African American man who believed in wearing sweaters and open-necked shirts in a kind of determined we're-all-casual-around-here manner. He was so cheerful, so enthusiastic, so smarmy, and so overconfident, it was unbearable. He also suffered from an incredible overdose of verbal diarrhea. Wim can talk the hind leg off a donkey better than most, but he was as silent as the tomb compared to Gershwin.
For the time we arrived at the appointment at the Bargain Registry to the time we dazedly staggered out of there two hours later, not knowing quite what had hit us, Gershwin talked.
And talked.
And talked some more.
"How are you? Pleased to meet you. And you are? Anastasia and Wim, right?"
"Uh . . ."
"Okay, great, welcome! Now, I understand you're in the market for a house?"
"Yeah, I . . ."
"What sort of a price range are we looking at here? Because we got all price levels."
"I . . ."
"Say you earn thirty thousand. That would qualify you for a seventy-five two-family, or a fifty thousand owner-occupied, at least."
"Oh, uh . . ."
"But that's okay. We have our own mortgage coordinator who comes in and does all the calculatin' for us. Eventually she'll require copies of pay stubs, credit reports, outstanding balances on credit cards, and any other debts you may have, plus assets.
"But as I said, that's all in the future. Of course, we could look at assuming a mortgage as opposed to taking out a new one. That would make a difference, and . . . but if you've never owned a house before . . ."
"No, I . . ."
". . . well, if you haven't, you'd qualify for this federal program for first-time homeowners called . . ."
And so the eager Gershwin continued, gesticulating wildly all the while. He didn't so much as talk to us, but rather at us. We were interested at first in what he had to say, but after twenty minutes of never-ending, fast-paced prattle, our heads were reeling from trying to absorb all of the facts and figures being thrown at us, and from translating realtorese into plain English.
Gershwin seemed to think we knew all about the ins and outs of real estate. We, in fact, knew very little. I know I knew absolutely nothing, and Wim, whose English is fluent and who had actually worked in real estate for a time back in South Africa, foundered by the wayside pretty soon after.
It might not have been so bad if Gershwin hadn't kept wandering off the subject on a tangent and then meandering laboriously back to the point he'd been trying to make, but which we'd lost a few sentences ago. And it might have been less confusing if he'd spoken a teensy bit slower and taken longer breaths between phrases so we could at least have had a chance to break in and ask him to repeat or explain something we hadn't understood right away. And throughout our visit, Gershwin kept smiling that huge, white-toothed grin that split his plump cheeks from ear to ear and caused his shining face to look quite cherubic. I'd never met anyone who could grin like that and talk at the same time, but that smile never wavered for one second.
All in all, we did manage to gather that the Bargain Registry served as a kind of last resort for sellers who had had their houses on the market for a while and were now listing them with the for-the-buyer Bargain Registry at a lower price.
I was put off a little by the news that the buyer, rather than the seller, paid a commission of nine percent, but Gershwin hastened to reassure me that although the Registry would be quite willing to take my money in advance and aggressively look for a house to meet my needs and pocket, they could also look for the house first and be paid once they found it. It was gently implied that without an up-front payment, their search would be slightly less enthusiastic, but being a thrifty person, I couldn't bring myself to part with any of my hard-earned green until I saw results. The commission seemed a little high, but if the Bargain Registry was able to find me a good house at a good price, I was willing to pay it.
I also had fixed ideas about the areas in which I was interested in buying a house. These just happened to be miles away, in the opposite direction of the territory Gershwin normally covered. But did that faze him? Not in the slightest.
"No problemo," he beamed. "I can work with you anywhere, and who knows, maybe I'll still be able to interest you in a property in my part of town - Schemmerhorn."
I would dearly have loved to have looked deep into his glossy, black eyes and said one simple word - "No." Instead, I found myself agreeing to come back another day to meet with the mortgage coordinator to work out how much a bank would risk lending me.
At the end of that first meeting, and feeling rather bemused, Wim and I edged our way out the door and toward our car. Gershwin jubilantly followed us, a spring in his step as he rejoiced in landing himself a new client. After a few blatant hints from me in the form of, "Well, we really must go, supper's on the table," and "Gosh, is that the time?" he reluctantly let us go, and we escaped into the blessed privacy of our car with heartfelt sighs of relief.
As we drove out of the parking lot, I looked back out of the rear window and saw a Cheshire-cat grin bobbing in the gathering dusk of the February twilight. The silence was so sweet, neither Wim nor I said a single word the whole way home.
Incidentally, when I had mentioned to Gershwin that, unlike the Profits of Doom, I did plan on being a landlord, he had immediately enthused, "Great! "Good idea!"
Well, he would, wouldn't he?
