A
Bizarre Adventure
One
day I got a call from a fellow looking for a country property in my area of
business. He was looking for a house on acreage. He had some pretty specific
requirements. Firstly, it should be a spacious house and garage. Secondly, it
should be as far as possible from a school so his children would be picked up
first and delivered home last in the day. Well that was an odd request and I
laughed, being sure he was joking. He wasn’t.
It
turns out he and his wife were running the general store just east of the
Teulon turn off on Highway 8, just north of Clandeboye, which they had turned
into a Gulf Oil bulk dealership. It was the old Carter’s General Store where my
folks had shopped at back in the day when it had been a country store. So that
established an immediate kinship and I put a considerable effort into finding
something. And find it I did. By blind luck I discovered a large, rambling
vacant property almost made to order. The place had been vacant for some six
months or so and the owner was anxious to sell, so we went in and had a look.
The place more or less met their needs and he said to me, “Let us think about
it.”
Well
he obviously didn’t have to think too long because the very next morning he
called me at about nine o’clock, saying he wanted to make an offer. But there
were conditions he didn’t think I could meet.
“Well,
try me,” I said confidently. The main condition was that he needed possession
that very day by 6:00 p.m. – actual physical possession. He would pack up
everything from the store and move it into the house at six o’clock. They
didn’t have that much stuff anyway and his wife was very efficient, he said. I
don’t quite remember all the flurry of putting this altogether or even the
selling agent’s name, but somehow it all went together and by six p.m. the
buyers were in the house. Fortunately we got to dump all the
legal issues on the
lawyers and
go on with our business.
That
was more or less the end of the affair except for a couple of footnotes. I
guess when Gulf Oil went to check the tanks on possession of the sale; they
found a considerable discrepancy between what was there and what was recorded.
I didn’t know much about it because I hadn’t been involved in that end of the
property sale. Quite frankly, the less I knew about it, the better I liked it.
I didn’t bother to visit my buyers or even call them on the phone. There’s a
time when you have to cut bait and move on. This was it. I desperately wanted
to find some NICE people to do business with. Not that I didn’t make a good
living from the Sicilian mafia or the drug induced crazies or the mortgage
defaulters, but it was getting a bit much for me. It seemed that was all I was
running in to. It was time to take stock of the direction of my real estate
career and reset my GPS system toward that kind of clientele. Surely there must
be some decent home buyers and sellers around. I would focus on them.
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