The silence is deafening. I sit, alone, waiting for the inevitable. The inevitable, however, to my short-sighted, human-scale point of view, is taking too goddamn long to make up its mind. I take a deep breath. I try to rid my brain of the endless stream of what-ifs being fired in a machine gun staccato by my consciousness disrupting the very calm it seeks in these trying. My effort is in vain.
As my long-time readers won’t recall, it’s been over fourteen years since I packed my life into a ten-foot trailer, backed away from my storage unit – damaging the trailer in the process – and pointed the steering wheel west, well, north initially because, Florida. Fourteen years since I rolled into the great Pacific Northwest, and almost fourteen years since my journey ended with me ensconced in the comfortable abode on Bainbridge Island where I now sit, waiting – to remind you – for the inevitable.
Because that comfortable abode, the micro-farm I wasted invested so much time, treasure, and effort on, is For Sale. Not only For Sale but For Sale by Owner. However, said Owner is nowhere in sight. In fact, the Owner is nowhere within this hemisphere. And, I’m sure this will surprise exactly no one, it’s all because I opened my mouth.
“I think we need to sell the house.” The missive arrived out of the blue like the dinosaurs’ asteroid.
“What do you mean ‘we’, whit… Oh, never mind.” It is, after all, her house and this being, for now, anyway, a free country, she is free to do as she pleases.
“What real estate agent do you think we should use?”
At which point I must digress. Back in the previous millennium I owned a “starter home” and it, as they do, was eventually outgrown. So, another house was purchased secure in the knowledge that the original house would sell because, it was represented by a Real Estate Professional. Ah, the delusions of youth. Said real estate professional was unable to sell the house so she recommended renting it “until the market improved”. Secure in the knowledge, blah, blah, blah, we rented it out to tenants whom we never met. Unbeknownst to the owner, me, the renters were people who, as I later found out, seemed to have a hobby of changing the oil in their tractor in the dining room letting the sludge spill across the hardwood floor.
Many hours of work hand cleaning and scrubbing and scraping and sanding and finishing later, the floor was repaired, the house was presentable, and the real estate professional declared that it was ready to start showing again.
“Go,” I remember telling her. “Fuck yourself.” And I sold it myself. And the one after that. And the one after that. Which brings me back to the present part of the story.
“No real estate agent needed,” I professed. “I can sell it for you.”
“You can do that?”
“Rodeo.”
So, off I flew to Thailand for a road trip with my daughter while my partner stayed home and packed stuff up. I returned, rested and reinvigorated, for the sure-to-be-easy sales effort. The market was hot – smokin’ hot, houses were selling for a not insignificant fraction of a manned expedition to the moon, and they were selling fast, less than a day in many cases and basically all of them within a month.
Because… every last one of them was represented by a Real Estate Professional.
Ironic, huh?
In the twenty-plus year interregnum between my last house sale and the current attempt, things, as they are wont to do, have changed. The real estate professionals have gone corporate and have adapted strategies to keep out competition and choke out any surviving small players that would make the Sinaloa Cartel blush with shame. In this case the “competition” included FSBO sellers. A-hem.
Sell it yourself? Good luck, bucko. You won’t be hearing from us. Buyer’s agents were reaching out to us like dentists extracting hen’s teeth. And, having raised chickens for all those years, we should know. It was as completely different now compared to twenty-four years ago as the Wright Brothers’ Flyer is to a manned expedition to the moon.
But, if I know anything, it’s that I know nothing, so I was undeterred. I developed a plan to ease the house into the market trying – well, hoping – to snag some low-hanging fruit that was on an intercept course to buy the house driven by a conspiracy of the Universe, chakras, kismet, or some other Bainbridge Island, New Age bullshit.
Out came the signs, and a trickle of people responded. Up went the online postings and the secret, back-door ways – no, literally – that bypass the Real-Estate-Professional-You-Do-That-And-You-Won’t-Be-Walkin’-So-Good Cartel and allow the FSBO listings to show up on Zillow, Redfin, Trulia, and all the other It-Doesn’t-Matter-What-We-Call-It businesses that support the aforementioned Cartel in their quest for domination.
But, as earlier determined, I know nothing, so I had to enlist some help. Namely, AI in the incarnation of Chat GPT, a thought process I have come to rely upon and consider almost a friend, if only it weren’t so stupid. Don’t get me wrong (again), it’s useful but it, like the vast majority of humans it seeks to subjugate, is dumb as a bag of hammers hidden in a box of rocks. It has no context and it has no perception, so, it has no idea if its answers are correct. All it knows that it has to answer something. So, sometimes you get absolute horse shit, sometimes you get an answer that is technically correct if only it were still 1978, and sometimes you get something new that you never even considered. Those answers in the last category are golden. They alone are worth the price of admission. Spending countless hours with The Chat has allowed me to come up with the continuation of the plan to sell the house, adding features to see what works in these modern times, what doesn’t and, ultimately, to by-pass the real-estate/industrial complex and sell the house.
However it’s marketed, The Chat isn’t “intelligent”. It can reason, but it’s missing a key component of real intelligence: the ability to ask itself “am I correct”. (Ha! You thought I was going to say, “Doesn’t watch professional sports!”) It can understand what you’re asking. It can search a massive database – the internet. It can collate, reason, and even tell you why it came up with an answer. But, it has exactly no ability to self-reflect and ask itself: “Am I correct?” It speaks with the same confident tone, with the same absolute certainty in its accuracy, regardless of whether its answer is spot on or total bullshit.
It does do one thing extremely well and that is to think of everything; to at least consider that the answer may exist in a realm that is not on the beaten path. The sheer volume of information it considers is well beyond whatever I, burdened by my preconceptions and know-it-all attitude, would even be able to consider trying to stuff in the rapidly degrading meat computer I possess. The result is, that on a regular basis, The Chat provides me with a line of thought that I didn’t even know existed.
Which is how I find myself sitting, alone, and contemplating my plan, its execution, and my guaranteed success. It’s Open House Day and people are showing up. Some because they live in the neighborhood and just saw the sign. Some because they’re really looking for a house and are fully engaged in the search with no BUY IT NOW, GODDAMN IT! pressure from a Real Estate Professional. And some, because they actually have nothing better to do.
So, yeah, it will sell. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. (To borrow a phrase.) I’m absolutely certain.
Because this is not my first rodeo.
