Published: 19 Dec 2019
The first thing I learned in Real Estate school was that “buyers are liars, and so are sellers”. Let me break that down for you. Potential buyers may walk into a Real Estate office and tell an agent that they only want to see properties priced at five hundred thousand and up. The intrigued agent starts compiling lists of homes in that price range and begins to qualify each home against other wishes expressed by his potential buyer; the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the size of the garage, the type of neighborhood, large or small yard space, and a dozen other things. The agent can spend days and days showing the buyers properties, but what happens when just the right home is presented and there is no offer made?
Nine out of ten times the buyer is not qualified for a mortgage for that price range of homes. The agent has wasted days of research, and untold hours of time showing those buyers around homes they couldn’t afford. OK., lesson learned, as soon as possible get your potential buyer approved by a mortgage lender.
The second part of the first lesson is that sellers sometimes will do anything to get their house sold. Everything from painting over drip marks on walls from a leaky roof to swapping out the custom made cabinets for particle board ones, cleverly disguised to look similar to the original ones shown. This is why there are home inspections done before closing and why there is usually a walk-through before the closing as well.
I had been selling homes for a few years when I had a strange call. A representative for HUD called me at my sales office. They held the mortgages on fourteen homes in a two block area of a neighborhood in a neighboring city. My office was in a suburb twenty miles from the city, but I had sold several homes in the city, and had sold plenty of homes in the burbs to former city dwellers. I was told that I was being considered to list these fourteen homes because of my success within the local board of Realtors, listing and selling homes both in the city and in the burbs, and my relations with the phone reps for HUD loans that had earned me the respect of this huge mortgage lender division of the government department of Housing and Urban Development.
Of course this would be quite a feather in my cap should I find buyers for all those homes, but first I had to do my own inspection of these homes. On my drive over to the neighborhood I envisioned a new development that hadn’t been successful and all these home had been repossessed by the lender, HUD.
What I found was an older neighborhood, about thirty-five to forty years old. It was a stretch to call it a middle class neighborhood, but with fourteen homes cleaned up and their average sized lots spruced up, it would certainly make the rest of the thirty or so other homes in the two block area look better.
By now I had the keys to the houses, and the budget from HUD for the clean up needed for these homes. I looked at my list of the addresses and began my inspections of the insides and outside of each to determine if this was even doable with the budget given me to work with. I was surprised by the conditions of the first three homes. The yards showed they had been maintained well, at least until the former owners had been evicted, the interiors were not full of junk left behind by the former owners. Some sprucing up was needed, but some of that was because the houses had been vacated for several months by now. With my detailed notes I went on to houses 4 and 5 just down the same street.
As I walked down to house #4, I started my written notes about this house. The yard was neat, the lawn mowed and the edges trimmed. Flowering plants of many colors were blooming in the planting beds across the front of the house, and two smaller bikes were leaning against the side of the house. According to my paperwork from HUD the house had been vacated two months ago, yet it looked lived in and well cared for. I made sure I had the correct key for the house and made my way across the front porch to the front door. I let myself in and began to inspect the rooms of the first floor. There was no furniture in the house that I could see and as I made my way to the kitchen I thought I could smell the odor of grilled cheese sandwiches.
Sure enough, there in the kitchen the smell was stronger and there in the kitchen sink was an old fry pan, still damp after it had been washed. There was a hibachi on the back porch, down on the floor with a piece of metal probably from a cut off section of the standing seam roofing metal panels used on the garage at the end of the driveway. Out on the porch was also a five gallon water bottle usually found on the top of home or office water coolers. There were a number of wash cloths and a couple of towels there on a rack drying, they felt slightly damp, and the water bottle was about half empty.
I have in the past run into situations where squatters had moved into foreclosed or empty homes for sale so my first reaction was to call a local cop I knew and have him come over to this house to finish going through it with me, so being the cautious guy I am I called him from outside as I stood on the front walk. I knew his schedule for a very good reason, NO, not that!, he was my older brother and I knew he had the middle shift this month, you know, the three to eleven PM shift. It was now about eleven thirty in the morning so he was able to drive the mile or so to meet me.
Rick and I met out front and he went into the house with me after I had told him about the smell of grilled cheese sandwiches and the fry pan in the sink and what I had seen on the porch out back. Again there was nothing else on the first floor so we quietly made our way up the front staircase to the second floor. The first of the three bedrooms was empty but the second one had two makeshift sleeping bags made from a couple of blankets folded over and safety pinned together to make a kind of sleeping bag. While Rick poked around in a waste basket in the corner of the room I opened up the other door in the room expecting to find an empty closet, but not the two young boys I found huddled in the far corner, scared shitless and the younger one, about 6 or 7 was crying and held in the arms of the older boy, who looked to be about 10 or 11. The older boy looked like he was ready to defend the younger boy from whatever or whoever had intruded on their space.
After getting down on the floor in front of the closet I began talking to them. I tried to talk at their level of comprehension so I could get them to open up to me. Rick stood behind the open door listening and when I had gotten their names and where they used to live with their druggy parents he stepped out of the room with his cell phone in his hand. Together the boys had made their way into this neighborhood from a much worse one about a mile and a half further into the city slum area. They had come home from school only to find their apartment empty and their parents gone.
That was about two weeks ago as far as they could tell. They had taken as much food that was left there and along with some other things, like extra clothing and some blankets, they had carried two big filled shopping bags of clothes and their school books, and a small cooler with some cheese slices, some bread, and two sticks of margarine. The water to wash with had come from a neighboring house’s garden hose which the older boy had used to fill the discarded five gallon bottle with just enough water for him to be able to carry.
I told them how much I admired their ability to take care of themselves, but wasn’t it time to let someone take care of them? Wouldn’t they like to come home from school to a snack before a really nice cooked dinner before they went to bed? Wouldn’t they like to have clean clothes to wear everyday? Wouldn’t they each like to get a hug before going to bed, and when they came downstairs for breakfast? Maybe from a guy like me who was tired of coming home to an empty house every day. Maybe from a guy like me who wanted a couple of boys just like them to share hugs with and share a house out in the country with, a couple of boys to go horseback riding with on the small farm he lived on. Maybe they would like to be friends with my two dogs, and run around in the yard and play with them after school?
By then I knew that the eleven year old was named Tyler and the seven year old was Glenn. They had crept a bit closer to me as we had talked and I sensed that they were calming down a great deal, now that they knew I meant them no harm, and that I had horses and dogs at home. I heard a “PSST” noise from the hall so I told the boys to talk it over while I spoke with my older brother out in the hall.
Rick had called the police station and had found out that the parents had been picked up two weeks ago and had already been charged in court with several drug charges and no mention of the boys had been made during their arraignment. Rick had found out that they had a court appointed lawyer and that no family members were listed on any of their documents. He asked if I had made up my mind to take the boys in and I must have looked at him funny because he told me that as soon as I had gotten down on the floor in my seven hundred dollar work suit, he knew I was hooked, just like our dads had been when Rick and I were found in an abandoned house twenty years ago, just like we had found Tyler and Glenn today.
We both went back into the bedroom with the boys and I asked them if they wanted to try living on my farm for a while and they both said they did, so I introduced them to Rick, we all gathered their belongings and we went to Rick’s house where his wife Penny was getting some housework done while their three boys were at school. While Penny and Rick talked with the boys I called my lawyer and arranged for him to go to the jail and present the parents of Tyler and Glenn with an option, either they sign custody of the boys over to me, or I would see that several additional charges would be filed against them, child abandonment and child neglect among them.
Penny was good enough to send us on our way an hour later with a frozen pan of lasagna so I wouldn’t have to do much but heat the main course in the oven and maybe open and heat a can of green beans and heat up a loaf of garlic bread for our dinner. She said I would be too busy doing laundry when I got home so the boys would have some clean clothes for tomorrow. We made it out of there before my nephews got out of school, otherwise we would have been there for hours longer. We’d save that kind of visit for a weekend. The drive home to the suburb I lived in didn’t usually take that long but I was pointing out a few things to the boys as I took the back roads to my little farm.
It had been one of my first listings when I was training with an established Realtor and the couple of times I showed it to other prospective buyers the more I felt at home there and I would spend more time there on my own just exploring on my own. There was the old farmhouse, a barn that was just as big as the two story house, a chicken coop behind the barn, and two outside storage buildings, with a lot of stuff in them from when this was once an active and much larger parcel of land. The old farmer had over time sold off acreage to adjoining farmers and now the property was reduced to just fifty acres, as opposed to the original three hundred it had been up to twenty years ago.
I had made an offer to the relatives of the old farmer who had put the property up for sale after he had passed three years ago, they needed the money and I had a good sized down payment so I only had to finance about forty thousand to be able to purchase the farm. Rick and I had both inherited sizable amounts when our fathers had passed while we were still in college and with some more of my funds and the commissions I had started to earn selling properties I was able to purchase four horses and four ponies from another estate sale and now with my dogs and horses I had been living alone on my property for the last three years and on the weekends usually had my brother and his family out to ride, sometimes they came out even if I was held up with showings or a weekend open house for one of my own listings.
After updating the farmhouse and sprucing up the outbuildings (with Rick and Penny’s help) my next project was an old cabin on the property. It was a one bedroom cabin done in a log cabin style and tucked in the woods about the distance from the main house of two football fields, about two hundred yards. Once that had been spruced up I searched for a tenant for it and was approached by an older couple from town. They were willing to do the chores around the property for a reduction in the rent I had been asking and when I found out that she loved to cook and clean and he had a good working knowledge about horses and farming I thought they would make a good pair of caretakers for me and my property. Rick told me it seemed like we had another pair of parents as his family was over for the day at least once a week.
Tyler and Glenn were more interested in seeing the horses and ponies in the barn than they were about getting settled in the house, so once we unpacked the car and they had a chance to use the first floor bathroom we went out to the barn. The horses intimidated them, but the ponies they fell in love with right away. Mutt and Jeff, my two rescue dogs, fell in love with the boys, as did Carla and John, my two resident caretakers. As Carla fussed over the boys I explained today’s events to John and when I mentioned how I got custody of the boys he clapped me on the shoulder and told me I had done the right thing. He then went and joined the boys and Carla was eager to get in the kitchen and begin our dinner for us.
I took the opportunity to start washing the boys filthy clothes in the first floor laundry room while the boys were occupied with John out in the barn. Carla kept asking questions from the kitchen as I was doing that and soon she too was brought up to speed with all that had transpired that day. She knew of a pediatrician in town and she thought I should let the boys get settled in for a few days before they had to start school, so she offered to “sit” with them until I got them registered at school. The elementary school they would be attending was just about a mile down our road, she also asked me to call on her when I had appointments when the boys would normally be home, she or John would sit with them then also
The boys checked out fine with the doctor the next week and John had already had them up and on the ponies by the time I had finished my last appointment on Wednesday of that week. That Saturday was when Rick and Penny brought their three boys out for the day at the farm. Penny and Carla spent a lot of time in the kitchen preparing heat and eat meals for me to use for our dinners, and gossiping, mostly about the boys while they were doing this. Rick and I, along with John, had a ball taking the five boys out for a trail ride or three, my nephews leading my two on some of their favorites. John and I had created these, mostly around the perimeter of the still usable fields that John maintained for our own use on the homestead. The boys had a ball and we three adults enjoyed watching the lads enjoy themselves.
My boys began calling me dad shortly after they started in our local school. I think it was peer pressure at first, but after a week or so it became a reality as our hearing in family court was held only three weeks after they came to live with me. The court approved the ironclad agreement that my lawyer had presented to the court and ninety days later to the day we had an adoption hearing. Everything worked out just as we had planned and I threw an adoption party for the boys that weekend at our farm where the boys new cousins were introduced to my boy’s friends from their school.
Surprisingly I received inquiries from some of the other parents there about selling their current homes and finding them new ones within the town. My office staff and the agents working under my brokerage license all told me how happy I seemed lately and how much my personal sales and listings had increased, even though I was trying to spend as much time during every day with Gregg and Tyler. There were two times when having Carla sit with them wasn’t practical and on only those two occasions did I have to take them on appointments with me, I made the sale to the buyers on both of those occasions. One of those buyers was a single man who was just a tad shy of my 29 years.
Brandon was a lawyer who had just struck out on his own, having worked at a big corporate law firm in the city. He told me that the more he had handled family related issues for his corporate clients the more he realized that he really wanted to practice family law. He and the boys got along great and so I invited him to a family dinner one night and I don’t know if he had been initially smitten with me, but for some reason, in our first two appointments in the office to get him qualified for a mortgage, I was drawn to him. Here I was, almost thirty, with my own little slice of paradise on Earth, two kids, two dogs, a barn full of horses and ponies, and a great support system at home and at work, and for the first time in my life I was falling in a sexual way with someone, finally, and a great looking guy at that!!
At our twenty fifth anniversary our boys came to the farm to be with us and celebrate. These two young men each brought their own families with them, so we had a house full to help Bran and I mark the day.
THE END
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