The following is a story of the most incredulous situation I have ever encountered with another Realtor and her client.
Unfortunately, there is much preamble to the story, all of which details the trials and tribulations of my poor, innocent clients.
Who knew the rental marketwas so competitive?
Whether buying or renting, moving into new digs is supposed to be exciting and adventurous, but quite often external factors mandate that all the fun is going to come at the steep cost of an outright nightmare.
When it comes to leasing, the potential for nightmares is greater since you are often working with a time-line. If you’re a renter, and you give or are given notice to vacate, you know you need to find a new residence by a certain date.
In a perfect world, you would tie up a new place in a few days, and then rest for the next seven weeks. But it doesn’t always work out like that.
To complicate things even further, we are in a very tight rental market right now, and there is a serious lack of supply in the downtown core – especially for entry-level 2-bedroom units!
Melanie and Katrina came to me near the end of September and needed to find a condo to lease for November 1st. They were roommates in an Annex duplex, and their landlord gave them the friendly heave-ho.
Time was on our side, but the market was not. The girls were working with a small budget ($1600 – $1800), and there was a lack of quality units for lease in the central core.
For those of you that have searched the rental market on your own, you know how frustrating it can often be.
For those of you that have never gone through this, perhaps the following events will shed just a little bit of light on it for you.
We started at the new development Rezen where we were to look at two identical 2-bedroom-plus-den, 2-bathroom units each for $1950/month. We figured that the price was close enough to their range that perhaps some money could be squeezed both ways, and we could make it work.
New developments are usually somewhat unorganized, but this was an utter joke. The units turned out to be 2-bedroom, 1-bathroom, and we actually spent a few minutes trying to envision a “den” and searching for that 2nd bathroom.
The listings had been mislabelled, since the brainless salespeople had probably never been in the units, but nevertheless, Melanie and Katrina liked the unit and were interested in the area. We figured that since they were advertising a 2-bedroom-plus-den, 2-bathroom for $1950, surely they’d come down to $1850 for what the unit really was.
We figured wrong.
In fact, BOTH the units were leased over the weekend for full price while the girls were trying to get their paperwork in order.
For virtually every lease completed through Realtors and the Toronto Real Estate Board, potential lessees need a credit check, employment letters, and a rental application. We prepared these documents, and kept searching.
The one highlight of this otherwise frustrating deal was that the girls were fun to work with, and we had entertained ourselves during our search. We looked at an older unit at 40 Homewood Avenue, and as soon as we walked through the door, I knew it was a god-awful apartment. There was a very large statue of a unicorn on the wall, and after thoroughly inspecting the unit, Melanie looked at me and said, “I think we’d be willing to take this place for $1600……if…..and only if……they threw the unicorn into the deal.”
Well, I’ve always maintained that tough tasks are made easier if you have fun doing them!
The next day we found a unit at Radio City on Mutual Street that was perfect. For $1850/month, it was three-year-old building in a central locale and the unit even came with a parking spot.
We saw the unit the day after it had come onto the market, and when I called the listing agent to register and offer, he told me there were already TWO offers on the condo.
The girls were sick to their stomachs. We just couldn’t catch a break.
That break did come, however, on the following Monday when the listing agent called me back and told me that BOTH the offers had fallen through (who knows why, perhaps shady tenants), and that I was more than welcome to submit my offer.
The girls became excited, and optimistic, but the optimism was premature as was any and all excitement we had during this month long ordeal.
After offering full price with an immediate possession date, somebody else came in at $100/month over the asking price and snatched the unit out from under us.
I felt this was very poor etiquette by the listing agent since he should have been loyal and worked with my offer, but in the end, he was working for his client and he maximized the dollar value by using my offer to prop up the other.
We had seen about ten places, tried to tie up 2-3, and we were still at square one.
We moved past the mid-way point of October, and the girls became nervous. They suggested to me that if I didn’t find them a place by November 1st, that they would be squatting at my condo until I did find them something, and that made me even more nervous!
In a sort-of last-ditch effort, I compiled a list of five places that were the only suitable condos to rent in their price range, regardless of location. We had seen everything there was to see, and these five places were the last options.
One of the options worked – a 2-bedroom loft at King/Bathurst for $1750/month, and I got that roller-coaster feeling in the pit of my stomach as I called the listing agent to ask if it was still available. She told me it was, and the girls signed an offer on the spot.
That was SIX DAYS AGO.
I’ve completed dozens of leases in the last few years, but this is one for the books.
I wrote about the “Worst Agent Ever” and a nightmare lease last year (click here), but this one turned out to be worse.
As bad as many of these deals have been in the past, what the listing agent did on this lease was something for the ages…
(TO BE CONTINUED)
