The Door Got Kicked in and There’s Blood on the Carpet – Why Again?

I spent some time on Saturday with some real estate friends and colleagues, and we were all talking about how boring our businesses were.

The business itself was exciting and interesting to each of us. And to a person it’s been a gratifying experience. But it never seems that anything really interesting happens, or at least nothing interesting enough to talk about to other people.

But then we got talking about the First House.

You know, the very first house that you got up the guts to actually make an appointment and go and see. That one.

And I got to remembering mine. The conversation with the seller seemed odd to me. While I was far from smooth then (some would argue still) I did my basic fairly blunt song and dance about needing a good deal, about paying cash, and about closing quickly. Strangely, this seller didn’t seem to bat an eyelash, and thought that a discounted sale price would work just fine. So we booked the appointment for the following Saturday.

The first bad omen was that we woke up Saturday to an unbelievable blizzard. I left with plenty of time to spare, but even in four wheel drive mode it took me 20 minutes to go a mile. I called and rescheduled for the following weekend.

The weather had moderated the next weekend, so I went to take a look. It was a two bedroom, one bath frame home on a slab in Waterford (I had not yet learned the proper purchase criteria from the Obi Wan Ijlal). It was also on a very nice double lot. Decent condition on the outside and not in need of anything before it could be rented. That was on the outside.

The inside was a little bit different.

Actually when the seller brought me in the front door the place didn’t seem all that bad. It smelled a little musty – but as I looked around I saw that basically all of the furniture and personal belongings were still there, such that it looked like the person living there had just up and left.

Pretty quickly I learned that that was almost the case.

All the rooms were in pretty decent shape until we got to the primary bedroom. The place was a mess. Personal belongings everywhere, couch cushions everywhere, the carpet torn up right in the middle of the room. And as it happened, in this home the back door was in this bedroom. It had been kicked in from the outside, and someone had put it back up in place and then nailed three 2x4s across the door to keep it in place.

I turned to the seller and asked – what the heck happened here?

“My son.” He said. “My son owned this home. Two months ago he had a violent reaction to some illegal drugs that he dad taken. He started bleeding badly (I did NOT ask for details) and he managed to call us, and we called the paramedics. They arrived the same time that the police were kicking down the door. They worked on him for about 20 minutes, but he ended up having a massive heart attack. And he was only 28. He died right there on the floor in the middle of the room where the carpet has been torn up.”

???

I didn’t end up buying that property. Nope. And it wasn’t because of the OD. Not at all. It was because the seller wouldn’t come down enough on the price to make it worth my while!

Hey – this is a business, isn’t it? And that wasn’t the only house that I looked at that someone died in. There was another. Maybe I’ll write about that one sometime. Talk about gruesome. I’ll tell you one thing though – you won’t BELIEVE the deal I got on it!

So it seems that after all of that this business really does have some interesting aspects to it. Maybe not on a day to day basis (I can tell because my wife’s eyes glaze over when I talk about  business), but enough to keep it interesting. Sometimes.