The Realtor has two brand new experiences. Neither of them were good.

Last week was quite a week.  I had two new situations that I've never had before in my eighteen years in practice.

First, a seller client passed away in the middle of our escrow.  I represent the buyer on this one.  This essentially puts a hold on the sale until all title issues can be cleared up.  It was a complicated deal to begin with as the seller was a FSBO (for-sale-by-owner).  What did I do on this one? Nothing, and let the estate take care of everything so we can close.

Second, I was blithely invited to commit loan fraud.  A potential buyer on one of my listings wanted to get a loan for x-amount of dollars, but also wanted to give the seller a lot of money outside of escrow so he wouldn't have to pay property taxes on the whole amount of the sale. (A property gets re-assessed by the County Tax Assessor when it changes hands.  In a normal sale, it is assessed at the purchase price.)  I pointed out that this is loan fraud, it's a federal crime, and I don't want to go to jail and neither does this buyer.  The buyer plainly didn't care.  What did I do on this one? I refused to write the offer, which would have been much lower than what the seller would have accepted anyway.

Sheesh! What will this week bring?