Our realtor, we’ll call her Marianne Khors for the purposes of this and any future blog posts, was a Manhattan Beach caricature. She was adorned in head to toe David Yurman jewelry, size, I sh*t you not, 11 feet in black flats that cost more than the contents of both of my suticases, and an arrogance that would be tough to cut with a knife. She had us sit in a conference room and after discussing how qualified she was to do the work that she does (always a red flag for me) she proceeded to take us through an exercise she self labelled “I’m going to prove you up”. This 15-20 minute demeaning exercise consisted of her placing a print out for each surrounding neighborhood in front of us and telling us we couldn’t possibly afford to live there. Manhattan Beach…look at all these places you can’t afford to live. Next, Hermosa Beach, no way, I mean look at these prices. Culver City, you’ll never be able to buy there. Aside from Ally McBeal type flashbacks where I imagined myself form tackling Marianne or just flat out punching her in the face, I wanted to scream, NO SH*T SHERLOCK, that’s why I didn’t ask to look in Manhattan Beach. I am actually shocked my wife kept quiet. I can and do hold my tongue in most situations like that even when I’m steaming inside. Liz has a short temper for rhetorical questions and being treated like a second class citizen. I would occasionally glance over at her and think, hmm, she’s going to lose it on Marianne any minute.
She introduced us to her daughter and partner, ‘Tiffany’, who would be driving around for the day. Before we left she handed us a list of 9 homes, all in Redondo Beach because that’s the only place peons like us could even hope to live. We boths got the feeling these were the only places she lined up for all 4 days. I swear she strategically placed house #1 first. It was right across the street from a gas station and right near the freeway and it was a total dump. It was a dump that would cost us 1k more than my current mortgage with 1/3 of the space and 100x the filth. When we got back into Tiffany’s car we joked that it could only get better from there on out. Boy were we wrong. We proceeded to see townhomes, condos, and single family homes where we either questioned how they could be so expensive, asked why they were literally built on top of each other, or felt like we needed to take a shower after touching the inside. The amount of un-pet friendly rentals was unbelievable to me. It would turn out to be our biggest barrier. 90% of the rentals on the market were not pet friendly. Of the 10% that were you would need to look very carefully at the description that would typically describe cats or small dogs being acceptable. We have 90 lb. Labradors…2 of them. Of the very limited places that accepted dogs, most satisfied the 3 D’s: dark, depressing, or dirty. Some you could get a 3 for 1 deal!
I looked over at my wife at some point during the 9 house tour and saw that she was on the verge of tears. When my wife gets close to tears and hasn’t recently given birth, things are bleak. I whispered to her, ‘just keep it together for another hour or so’. I’m definitely the more emotional one but I can generally keep it together when she is a mess and visa versa. My stress symptoms began to manifest themselves physically with an unforgiving headache that was a wicked combination of 4 hours of sleep, time change, not enough caffeine earlier that morning, and my flight receptors telling me to get out of LA and get out fast. We went back to the conference room, the scene of the earlier ‘prove you up’ exercise, and recapped our day. We had 2 rental properties to line up in Culver City the next day, another place we certainly couldn’t afford to buy so why even bother looking? We asked about a property in Culver that we had sent her earlier in the week to inquire about whether she had reached out to the contact on the Trulia listing….which was met with a very confident response: “you didn’t send me that property, I would have remembered that one.” Liz promptly pulled up her sent emails showed Marianne the email with the listing attached. Again, met with an overconfident response: “well, you sent me so many emails!” Marianne left a message for the contact listed…fingers crossed. We promptly said goodbye but Marianne felt the need to follow us out and say things like: “see, I told you that you’d want drugs by the end of the day”, “we’ll find something”.
My wife sat in the passenger seat, put her head in her hands, and did what her mind had been telling her to do all day…she cried her freaking eyes out. Once she had a good long cry she told me how much she hated Marianne and that whole ‘bullsh*t exercise’ she put us through. After she vented about our realtor she cried again. She told me she thought we were making a terrible mistake. I didn’t know what to do so headache be damned I drove to Culver City. I knew we would see it the following day but a friend of hers lived there with her family now and if it helped end our day with even a littlest glimmer of hope I had to try it. We drove by the house on Globe – not terrible but didn’t seem like the best location. Then we drove by a home on LaSalle that seemed neglected. 2/3 didn’t seem promising. Then we drove to Bluebell (real name removed). As we made the drive we noticed it had the feel of a real neighborhood even though you are in LA. Huge trees lined the sidewalks and people were out walking. When we pulled up in front of Bluebell we saw it was right across from a big park. It was a bustling park with a kids of all ages playing and participating in volleyball, baseball, and soccer. Ahh, our little glimmer of hope.
That night we grabbed a pizza and went back to our hotel. We were spent and just wanted to eat and sleep. I googled and the address of the hotel that relocation services had booked for us and as we got closer and closer I feared for our home over the next 4 days. We pulled into the Candlewood Suites in Hawthorne. It was a stone’s throw from LAX airport and it was just as bad or worse than most of the homes we had seen earlier in the day. Our room overlooked a giant trash site with oversized dumpsters (a picture is worth a thousand words). We got into our pajamas, silently ate enough pizza for the hunger pains to subside, turned over and went to bed.
