Giving Up?

I freely admit to spying on neighbors.

However, I'm not sure you should even call these ones neighbors. House flipper realtors don't really count as neighbors.

I saw a couple in a white SUV on the driveway, talking to the "owner" flipper. I watched from my window. The conversation did not look congenial.

At first, I thought maybe it was a potential buyer, then I started wondering if it was the realtor. The couple was a man and a woman, but the woman was a lot older than the man, so I didn't think they were husband and wife, but maybe colleauges.

It looked like the owner was sort of arguing, maybe not in a contentious way, just trying to get his points across, and the couple looked like they were utterly unconvinced.

Later, I noticed that their footprints in the snow showed that they went to the front doors of the house where the electricity disconnection notices were still posted. I also noticed that the owner backed into our yard and made a mud rut with his back tire.

The next day, the real estate agent's sign was removed.

News of the housing markets just keep getting worse. I went through the back yard around the pool last night, looking for a cat and noticed that there was 2½' of water in the pool equipment room. Obviously, the drains are clogged with leaves and debris. It's possible that the cabana that they removed used to keep the water out and the deck that they replaced it with does not. I wonder how much damage the water is doing to the pool heater and filter? More money just evaporating away.

I wonder if we'll see a foreclosure sale sometime?

Postscript:

I called the realtor. It was another exercise in unreality. The secretary had a guy call me back that didn't even know that their company was listing the property. He kept trying to engage me on the phone, even when I figured out that I needed to talk to Pamela. Truly Dave, you are an idiot.

Pamela is his kindred spirit. Maybe they are brother and sister, their mental processes were certainly a match. Pamela said that they were going to "re-list" it. This is another meaningless buzz word that can mean anything they want it to mean, similar to the way they would tell us that the house was "under contract", which we were supposed to interpret as meaning that they had someone interested in buying it, when it really meant "I don't want you to think we are losers".

Pamela (if that is her real name) said the house is now $900,000 (down from $1.2 million - 25% off! that's a real sale!). They would be willing to take $875,000, as is. That means that for $900,000 he'll finish working on the house. Then she proceeded to tell me about the granite counters they are going to put in the guest house.

If this isn't like putting makeup on a pig, I don't know what is.