Cabin goney goney ...

In 1998 we bought cabin up in Winthrop, WA - great vacation country! Absolutely stunning, all year. But, the drive is 18 hours or more ... so, the house sits idle; and, when we get up there, we face deferred maintenance.

In 2004 we decided to sell, but the house didn't move. We liked the way it was advertised and handled by Sheila Coe (Coldwell Banker in Winthrop, WA); she's the agent that we used to buy the place, and that our friends have used, and we like her both personally and professionally. As best we can tell she was just selling into a crappy market (there were, like, 80 listings up in Pine Forest then) and we told her we were still a bit ambivalent about selling, so we kept the price at the top of the market. We ended up loaning out the house to our neighbors, as a temp place while they built a new home.

In Sept '05 the neighbors moved into their new place, so we re-listed the cabin. We chose a different agent, mostly because I dislike Coldwell Banker based on some past transactions with a different office, and after all, Sheila hadn't sold the house, so we figured to give someone else a shot.

The selling process this time was annoying. I felt we got fragmentary information, delivered slowly; long silences when the agent went out of town without warning, etc. I was perturbed by not having the house as widely advertised or as well monitored as I expected. (It was pretty much invisible to a Google search - that's awful!) I was always asking for ideas about how to improve the marketing, how to improve the traffic through the house or the attractiveness of the house ... so I was getting cranky, and it was starting to show - I'm sure I was a pain in the ass for him to endure.

This taught me a lesson - sign up with an agent that matches your style. I expected an ongoing conversation with status reports, he expected to interact only when something very specific came up. I was getting ready to change agents, when another agent in the office brought us an offer. The offer was 10% down, but it was clean so we took it.

The closing process through LandAmerica Transnation in Omak was another sorry exercise in customer non-service, or maybe mis-expectations. They didn't tell me what to expect or provide a schedule, were slow to respond to questions or requests, delivered a cashier's check and charged me $40 overnight fees, even though I asked for electronic deposit, etc. Escrow agent went out of town on a family emergency (didn't tell me) so assistant closed escrow ... I didn't get the settlement statement (an emailed PDF) until a week after closing when I kept asking.

The point isn't really to rant as much as it is to keep in mind that vacation-area styles may be very different from the Silicon Valley-area practices. I should have been more careful about interviewing and clarifying. Maybe next time I'll be smarter!