California
Super Star Member
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2004
- Messages
- 14,930
- Location
- An hour north of San Francisco
- Tractor
- Yanmar YM240 Yanmar YM186D
I gotta share this story with you all:
Thursday I got a call from a Realtor. He is selling the vacant farmland next door and is offering it to neighbors first. He mentioned an address for it. MY ADDRESS!
I told him he was a fool and any prospects that come to my house will be told he is a fool. I don't need other brokers invading my privacy due to his mistake.
He replied it was too late. He said he got that address assigned from the Planning Department because the vacant parcel had never had an address, and it was the last house number available on our half-mile easement. (Our addresses are assigned as if we lived on the county road that the nameless easement takes off from, and he thought the next number already existed out on the county road.) He had already put the listing in Multiple Listing Service with that address and expected many prospects would come up from San Francisco to look at it.
He said he was the first to make formal application for that house number and that I would have to work out something else. I replied I'm sure somewhere around here I can find letters to my address from the era of 3 cent postage, and I know where I have filed Grandma's death certificate from 1956 showing that address. I told him to go back to the Planning Department and correct his mistake immediately. And how could he drive past my mailbox and not see my address on it? I doubt he ever looked at the parcel when he got the listing from the seller.
That afternoon he drove out to tell me the Planning Department had given him a different house number and they weren't out of numbers after all. He was anxious that I hadn't already driven off his first prospects, and assured me he had changed the listing in MLS so no one was likely to bother me.
He started in describing the parcel, and the second thing he said was that the easement along the edge of my orchard and all the way out to the county road would need to be widened because it would be a major detriment to the kind of person who would build a million-dollar view home on that parcel. I replied that all the city folk buy big SUV's to visit their rural land so what's the problem? Road widening would take out the dense double-planted row of apple trees that is my buffer from that shared gravel driveway and I wouldn't agree. The neighbor at the end of the lane has found it suitable for 80 years, maintains everything beyond my own driveway, and we like it just like it is.
I suspect there will be further chapters to this soap opera before we are done. I will welcome new neighbors but I hope this fool broker doesn't scare away all the decent people.
Thursday I got a call from a Realtor. He is selling the vacant farmland next door and is offering it to neighbors first. He mentioned an address for it. MY ADDRESS!
I told him he was a fool and any prospects that come to my house will be told he is a fool. I don't need other brokers invading my privacy due to his mistake.
He replied it was too late. He said he got that address assigned from the Planning Department because the vacant parcel had never had an address, and it was the last house number available on our half-mile easement. (Our addresses are assigned as if we lived on the county road that the nameless easement takes off from, and he thought the next number already existed out on the county road.) He had already put the listing in Multiple Listing Service with that address and expected many prospects would come up from San Francisco to look at it.
He said he was the first to make formal application for that house number and that I would have to work out something else. I replied I'm sure somewhere around here I can find letters to my address from the era of 3 cent postage, and I know where I have filed Grandma's death certificate from 1956 showing that address. I told him to go back to the Planning Department and correct his mistake immediately. And how could he drive past my mailbox and not see my address on it? I doubt he ever looked at the parcel when he got the listing from the seller.
That afternoon he drove out to tell me the Planning Department had given him a different house number and they weren't out of numbers after all. He was anxious that I hadn't already driven off his first prospects, and assured me he had changed the listing in MLS so no one was likely to bother me.
He started in describing the parcel, and the second thing he said was that the easement along the edge of my orchard and all the way out to the county road would need to be widened because it would be a major detriment to the kind of person who would build a million-dollar view home on that parcel. I replied that all the city folk buy big SUV's to visit their rural land so what's the problem? Road widening would take out the dense double-planted row of apple trees that is my buffer from that shared gravel driveway and I wouldn't agree. The neighbor at the end of the lane has found it suitable for 80 years, maintains everything beyond my own driveway, and we like it just like it is.
I suspect there will be further chapters to this soap opera before we are done. I will welcome new neighbors but I hope this fool broker doesn't scare away all the decent people.
