Who are these people who sell property?

Now we have to learn how to deal with Real Estate agents and how to make the most of realestate.com.au. Right now there seem to be millions of houses for sale and if we were to try and look at each house that took our fancy or looked even slightly as though it fit our criteria we'd be doing nothing but looking at houses.

This morning, very early, before heading off to the gym prior to going to work I sat and trawled the real estate web site while sipping my cup of morning tea. I did what I always take as the easy option and just hit the "contact agent" link to ask when the next open house would be on three homes I was interested in seeing. Only one of the agents bothered to call me and he seemed very "enthusiastic". An American with a perfect explanation and response for everything. The house appears, by all the pictures, to be huge - five bedrooms, two bathrooms, 3 car garages, a brand new kitchen etc. I know by experience already that pictures can be deceiving so I'm not going to trust that the pictures tell the whole story. The agent informed me that there was indeed an open home this coming weekend. "Great" I said "see you there" believing that to be the end of the conversation. In his drawl he said oh so politely "Michelle, tell me what it is you're looking for in a house". I told him - we'd prefer it to be 3 bedrooms at least and with any luck, have a teenage retreat downstairs for a girl who likes to play several musical instruments very loudly. We also wanted it to be "ready to live in", decor unimportant but it had to need no immediate construction work done to it. That's something we have neither the time nor the money for right now. Functional and ugly we can live with and change as we go but falling down is not an option for us.

The agent, of course, quickly reminded me that the home I had enquired about had all of those features. This I already knew from it's description and I told him so. He kept me on the line by telling me he really prefers to do "private viewings" and just happened to have told the owner of the home "not to be home tonight" because he was showing some others through and asked me if I could make it then. Since weekday evenings are not good for us I politely declined. He kept pushing and then told me that the house already had three offers on it and it had only been on the market for three weeks and that with it being exactly what I want I'd have to be quick about getting in there and making an offer of at least "blah".

I agreed to try and meet him this evening and would call him later after I had spoken to my husband. I got busy with work and had not yet got around to calling Ben when the agent called me again only a couple of hours later. I almost had to tell him to shut up so I could hang up and call my husband as I had not yet had a chance to do so. Ben agreed to try to make it also but his work is unpredictable. I called the agent back and relayed this newest informatin to him. He sounded so pleased, as though it was the thing he'd been waiting to hear all his life.

Later, after I had collected the small one from kindy and arrived home Ben called me to tell me he just didn't think he'd get out of work in time so I called the lovely agent back to apologise and tell him it just wasn't going to work out for us tonight. He's my long lost friend now and even pretended to care when I whined about how much of a brat my kid had been during the drive home from kindy. He kind of reminded me of a real estate agent handling the sale of a home I once rented. He wanted to bring some potential buyers through at 7AM and to butter me up offered to drive my then 7 year old daughter to school. I didn't know this guy from a bar of soap and there was no way I was going to allow him to drive her to school. I did allow him to show the people through but I did alter our routine to accommodate them.

So situation is - Saturday, three homes to inspect, one kid to get to guitar lessons in amongst all that and another visit with the mortgage broker (on her first visit I was struck down by the side effects of a terrible infection and took almost nothing in). Then Sunday I have to jet off to the far north for work so house hunting will, thankfully, be on hold for a week.

I'll report back on the events of Saturday when they get here.

Oh and a PS to this is that just today alone I received over $1000 worth of bills in the post. That puts us one step behind when it comes to saving anything in the next few weeks.