For some time now I have been renting. This is not my preferred choice, it’s my only choice. I simply want to say this: some professions require you to be dishonest and compromise your personal integrity in order to make it. In my understanding, telling your tenants, “you will help them” or “you will look into it” is lying. Don’t say one thing and then do another. That’s deceitful.
My recent decision that most real estate agents can’t be trusted comes off the back of a lease arrangement. When I first rented the house I have now, I had two pets. One died. Fast forward twelve months and we now have one dog and are looking to get another. A simple thing isn’t it. I mean really, It’s a dog. I am not asking for a new fence, a back door that closes probably or a light in the kitchen am I? Neither am I expecting them to continue a committment that the law says they should honour. Far be it from me to ask for something so commonplace as that.
What I want is what they agreed to in the first place. Two pets. Six months of negotiating, two or three phone calls to the most useless rental tenancy agency in the whole damned world and alas no second pet. I mean really why do we have the RTA anyhow? The amount of times I have called them and told them what my current real estate are up to and nothing. You know what they told me last time I called them, negotiate with them. That’s why I rang the RTA in the first place! Renters rights in this state are a joke. A living joke. I know we have it a lot better than a lot of other countries. Still, the tenancy agreement contracts you sign in this state are not worth the printed paper they are scribbled on.
Now to my point. Let’s play the imagination game shall we? I ring you and ask you something which you say you will look into and I rest my phone comfortablely in it’s socket, eagerly awaiting for you to call. Two, three weeks later nothing. I call again, same deal. Fast forward six months and still no response. It’s a dog, damn you, a dog! I had two pets on the original lease WHY CAN’T YOU GET YOUR BLOODY ACT TOGETHER AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS! I will tell you why, because you find it easier to lie and continue to feed me grain fed BS.
I have all together lost faith in the rental system. Over the past six years I have been constantly lied to, tricked, had lease conditions changed and told by the very body that protects the tenants in Queensland that there is nothing I can do. I no longer have any faith in real estate agents and so help me God if I ever get the money to buy a house, I will do so privately. Why? Well I would rather eat broken glass then put my money in the hands of real estate agents. Over the past six years I have been burned more times that I could ever hope to write about in one sentence.
Having said that, I am simply relating an experience here, I am not generalising. This is my experience. I have heard of people who love their agents and get on famously with them. I try. If I learned anything from fishing it’s this: don’t put your hand back in the mouth of a fish that just bit you. Yes, it’s an obscure metaphor but it works for me. I am sorry but I just don’t trust real estate agents anymore.
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