'Take Off Your Pants!'
A Squeaky Clean Showing
Why I'm Afraid of Models

'Take Off Your Pants!'

It was my first day working with an out-of-state couple looking to buy a home. We finished viewing the inside of the first home, and the husband decided to take a walk around the outside. When he stopped in the front yard, he started to scream in pain. I realized what was happening and yelled, “Take off your pants!” The wife was shocked at my outburst and gave me a look that could kill. But she knew exactly what I meant once she realized her husband was standing in the middle of a fire ant hill! I reopened the vacant house so the husband could go inside and wash off the ants in the shower. Luckily, the painful episode didn’t deter these buyers—we continued looking at homes that day with the husband in wet clothes and bare feet. They didn’t buy that house, but they did purchase another one. We became very close friends and remain so to this day.

—Susan Gruber, CRS®,GRI, a sales associate with Professional Realty Consultants of Lee County Inc., Cape Coral, Fla.

A Squeaky Clean Showing

I was showing a house to a client who had three small children. As we were viewing one of the bathrooms, I heard a loud crash behind me. One of the kids had knocked over a goldfish bowl— there was water all over the kitchen and a goldfish flopping on the wet floor! I quickly grabbed a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water to save the goldfish. But how was I going to clean up the water without a mop or towels? I tried to locate the seller, but no one answered the phone number I was given for him. I hunted around the house and finally found a mop to clean the floor. Unbeknownst to me, the seller was next door at the neighbor’s house, watching me cleaning up from the window. He finally came over, laughing. He told me that the whole time he was watching he was thinking: “Geez, I cleaned the place up, but I guess it wasn’t clean enough! She’s mopping the floor?”

—DeAnn Connolly, a sales associate with Rose-Marie Frantz & Associates, Frederick, Md.

Why I'm Afraid of Models

I routinely make sales visits to builders at their model home centers. One year, a couple weeks before Christmas, I was out making the usual rounds. I pulled into the driveway of one of the model homes, and walked up the sidewalk with flyers and business cards in hand. An elderly couple was decorating a tree for Christmas on the property, and I thought how nice it was for the builder to have hired the couple so they could make a few extra bucks for Christmas. I opened the front door of the home and was surprised that I didn’t see the builder anywhere. However, I wasn’t nearly as surprised as the elderly couple was to see a perfect stranger going into their new home. Needless to say, they did not wish me a Merry Christmas as they ushered me out the door. To this day I am “model paranoid.”

—Carol Kerr, mortgage account executive with Bank of America, Fernandina Beach, Fla.

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