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Story of the month ...

December 2012: Broker or Breaker? We recently ended up in the situation that we had to rent out our house. Not a problem, we thought. We'll find a property manager, and they will take care of this based on a reasonable fee. So many people are in the same situation, and we saw no reason why this should not work out well for us.

A friend recommended a company, and we met the two people, a seemingly nice middle-aged woman, and a stately and very selfconfident middle-aged+ man. They called themselves real estate brokers, not property managers. At first, their overconfidence and their need to tell us again and again how lucky we are that we are working with them and not with one of all the other very bad property managers made me feel a bit uncomfortable. My experience is that those who need to tell that they are better than others, in fact, that they are the only good ones, normally turn out to be the bad ones. However, they were nice, and I quietened the warning voice inside of me.

Unfortunately, the inner voice was right. The brokers turned out to be the worst choice, and they better should call themselves the breakers. They nearly broke us. First they found tenants with a dog, ignoring our "no-pet" condition. Then, they removed property from our real estate and threatened to through this away. Then, when a minor problem in the bathroom surfaced, they asked for $5,000 to fix the problem. We stepped in and got the problem solved without costs. And all the time, they maintained their arrogant attitude that they are the best. Best in what? Breaking the property owners, I assume. Interestingly enough, they are not present on the web, and Angie's List can't find them. Normally, I would have done a web search to find out more about them, and not finding them would have been a red light. But, their eloquent behavior was good enough to channel me into the unusual: accept breakers for brokers. The most natural URL for them, http://www.renorealestatebrokers.com is actually not available, but there is no web page behind this URL. Another weird fact about the brokers who are breakers.


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.