Excerpts from this article about real estate soliciting – it’s going to get crazier! Hat tip to just some guy:
Jennifer Folden-Nissen’s three-bedroom, Victorian-style house in Duluth, Ga., isn’t for sale. But that hasn’t stopped a guy calling himself Henry from phoning her at least once a week. She says the pitch is always the same: “I want to buy your house. I’m willing to pay cash. Today.”
She says it’s sort of like having to deal with an insistent car salesman. “I just let him leave voicemails,” she says. But even those are pushy. “Call me back, call me back, call me back, call me right now — I’m out front of your house.”
Folden-Nissen works at the local fire department, and she’d call home and ask her husband to see if the guy was outside. But nobody ever was. Then she started to get postcards from the same guy — with no stamp, so apparently hand-delivered — with photos of her own home on them.
“It was a little freaky because some of it was just like, OK, is the guy really outside?” she says. “And why is he taking pictures of my house if I haven’t given him the time of day?”
“They have just gotten increasingly worse in the past six months, six or seven calls every day,” says Lauren Barber, who lives in Columbus, Ohio.
“If you know anything about Columbus, it’s growing and it’s hot,” she says. “People want to live here.” Barber bought her house about 10 years ago for $155,000. She says now it’s worth more than twice that.
Investors can go on the internet and buy lists of phone numbers for people whose homes have risen in value, maybe more than the owners’ realize.
Barber works in human resources, so she says she has to answer her phone. “It could be one of our employees calling me with a question.” She says she tries to block the homebuyer calls, but they always seem to somehow call from a different local-looking number.
She says one of them even called her mother’s house, on purpose, to ask if Barber would sell.
“Like, really, you’re going to call my mom and ask her if I’m going to sell my house to you? It was just the most absurd and amazing thing,” she says. “But I told you no. Stop calling me. Don’t bother my mom.”
More homeowners across the country are getting breakup calls from Zillow Offers, offering thousands of dollars to break off homeowners’ contracts to sell their homes to Zillow.
Can you go into more detail Jim? I have a few questions for my favorite realtor:
1. What did Zillow NOT see when they started the program and why didn’t it work?
2. What happens if the homeowner doesn’t accept the money to break off the contract?
3. How much of a disaster was it for Zillow?
[Mahalo]
I get them relentlessly (for my tiny 700SF 1950 OB cottage in 7k lot)!! I tell them $5M (cash, small bills, meet me in the alley within 24 hours; and I get to live here rent-free until I croak) and that seems to tamper their enthusiasm ……