More Looking

We continued on with our property search the next day. Once again, we drove the realtor's car.

And once again we missed a few and had to back track to find the properties. Oy vey! After a while it became a joke amongst us: would we be able to find the next property without having to back track?

This one was on a beautiful 20 acre piece loaded with oak trees. It had an older mobile home on it and a really nice shop building. The real problem was the mobile home. When we first pulled up and were looking for the lock box we noticed a multitude of wasps buzzing around. That was a little uncomfortable.

The entry door is that white door on the right. This is from the living room looking to the kitchen.

A very dated kitchen.

View from the kitchen towards the living (again, the entry door is the white door on the left.)

This is the main bathroom. The house was set up to be wheel chair accessible, as you can see with this roll-in shower. Anyone who knows me knows I prefer a tub.

The outbuildings were much nicer. There was a smallish chicken coop (not shown) and this shop that was divided into three sections.

This was the largest, then the back portion, accessible from this room and another door on the outside, was divided into two more rooms for storage or crafts or whatever. There was a giant black widow in one of those rooms. By the time we got to that area I was so creeped out by all the other webs and creepy crawlies I decided to forgo the spider photo op.

The property was the best part of this whole package. It was all on a gently sloping hill, and like I said, had tons of oak trees. I could easily picture my cows and possibly new sheep grazing out there with my riding trail criss crossing between the large paddocks.

This is the upper corner of the property (where the trees are on the right) looking at the neighbors next door (on the left) and across the valley. The price tag on this piece was $299,000, which is easily within our budget. But not with that house. This valley is being advertised as the next wine growing region and that may be why the price was kind of jacked up.

Now here was another property we looked at that was at the bottom of a valley, so it was all flat. This was one of those odd places supposedly for sale. I say supposedly because the owners said not to drive in because they didn't want us to "disturb the tenants". ??? Is it for sale or not? I'm not going to buy something I can't fully examine!

So here are just a couple of pictures taken from the outside fence line.

It was supposed to be 36 acres and since we didn't have an aerial or plot map we had to guess at the boundaries.

As we were driving away I said that it just didn't look like 36 acres to me. I found out later when the realtor ordered an aerial map that we had only been looking at about 15 of the acres. It was an "L" shaped property and we were only looking at the small end of the L.

They were asking $375,000 for that one. It would have been interesting to see the interior of the two homes on that one. According to the flyer the main residence was "super good cents". Not sure about that from what we could see from the road. This may be a "come back for a closer look later" when the time comes.

This next home was up a steep hill. By this time I thought the realtor would have known pretty much what I was looking for. By the time we got up to it I could already tell it wasn't going to work for me, but since we were there and the house was vacant we went ahead on in. I have to admit, this was one of the nicer homes from the outside and I was curious to see what the $350,000 price tag came with.

This is from the side of the house looking out the back. The main floor was the top floor. Then there were stairs to a large basement area with another almost finished bedroom. It had a nice big deck out the back as you can see.

I love the oak trees! Unfortunately most of these 24 acres was pretty steep, and therefore unusable for my needs.

From the nook through the kitchen to the living room.

Here you can more easily see the steepness I was talking about. It was all like this except for the immediate area the house was sitting on.

Too bad. I liked this house and it was within our means.

A few things I haven't mentioned yet were about the realtor. She didn't seem very organized.

If I were the realtor and I was unfamiliar with the listing I would have checked on the map and maybe even printed a map out for each location. I would have ascertained what type of property my client wanted and therefore saved a lot of time and driving by not going to places that wouldn't have worked. Knowing my client was from out of state I would have made appointments for the places that had tenants. I would have double checked the MLS to make sure the list she gave me had all the types of places she was looking for, especially since she admitted her list was incomplete! (I found a few places we could have gone to after I got home!)

Having said all that, there was the issue of her driving. She had to fill up with gas every day. Was she waiting for me to offer to pay for gas? Once she stopped to get lunch (Vicki and I had already eaten). She ended up getting a small bag of nuts. Was she waiting for me to offer to buy her lunch? She drove excrutiatingly slowly. Several times she stopped in the middle of the road to look at a "cute house". When she was looking for her sunglasses or phone (while driving) she kind of swerved around the road just a little. When cars came by she would move into position to let them pass and she would give them a wave and say "we're just tourists!" Once she made a turn onto a side road while she was doing something else. She was then driving in the wrong lane and another car was coming at us. I had to say "car...CAR" before she moved over to the proper side. "Just sightseeing!" At the property above where we weren't supposed to go in lest we "disturb the tenants" when she backed out of the driveway she ran one wheel off the street and almost backed into a ditch.

Then there's the issue of not getting her full attention. As I mentioned earlier she couldn't see us that first day because she had other things to do. Then one of the days we couldn't get started until afternoon because of another business she had (unrelated to real estate) that she had to do. And another day was a late start so she could take care of "personal business".

Several people have told us to get a new realtor. So how do we break it off? We didn't sign any contracts so there isn't really a legal issue. I do feel kind of bad because she has been sending us listings (albeit through an automated system so she's not really doing anything). She did drive us around. She did order several aerials of properties so we could see the boundary lines (I assume she has to pay for those--how much I don't know). And to top it all off her mother is ill.

Do I just not make any contact with her again? Ignore future e-mails?

I don't like this part. I'd appreciate any helpful suggestions.

***more tomorrow!***