I posted this story in another thread and though I would also post it here so it didn't get lost!
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I had an interesting run in with "changing places" a few months back....
These guys are still an agency but not a traditional agent as such.
I rang in regards to a property that I was interested in going through and was greeted by a courteous lady who was in a hurry. It was a wednesday afternoon and she was busy. She asked to call me back later that day.
She didn't call me back until Thursday afternoon after I called to jog her memory.
We organised to go through the property on Saturday morning at 10:00. I arrived at 9:50 and at 10:20 I called the agent and she said she was just around the corner. 10 minutes later she called back to say she was still in a suburb that was 25 minutes away and that she had told a mistruth (her words).
She asked if we could wait for her to arrive and after discussing with my wife we agreed.
The agent arrived at 11:20 and she was rather aggressive considering she had wasted 1 and half hours of our time.
We went to the front door with her telling us that the owners were on holidays and she had had a problem with the keys not working here on other occassions.
Guess what! The keys didn't work. The agent proceeded to show us through the house from the windows.....
In disbelief I asked if we could organise to come through the house at a later date preferably without her.. (I wasn't rude, I just made it clear tha we liked the house but not the service.)
1 week later (the earliest we could get through) I was greeted at 10:10 (another 10:00 appointment) by a male agent who was extremely apologetic about what had happened with his long time friend (female agent) he couldn't believe what had happened himself and purported to be shocked.
I asked him for a business card and he said that he could not give us one as he really didn't work for this agency. He was retired and was simply doing this as a "favour" for his friend....
We looked through the house and decided that even if it was the right one, it probably wasn't, based solely on the experience we had with the company to this point.
My wife rang the owner of the franchise in question and we never received a phone call back.
We were dissapointed and did not look at anymore homes listed with them.
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Matt