Caller: “I wanted to look at some properties in [Neighborhood]. How much are they selling for?”

Me: “Were you looking for a house or apartment? How many bedrooms?”

Caller: “I just wanted to know if [Neighborhood] properties are going for high or low?”

Me: “Well, it’s a pretty big area. If I knew the type of property you were looking for, I would be able to—”

Caller: “I don’t need to go through all these questions. I’m just looking for a ballpark on how much a [Neighborhood] property would go for.”

Me: “Hmm, well, they have an abandoned dementia hospital with twenty-three bedrooms going for about ten million.”

Caller: “What?! I don’t want an abandoned hospital! And I don’t have anywhere near that much! I just wanted to know if I could get a three-bedroom house for under $400,000!”

Me: “…let me see what I can find, sir.”

I do real estate photography. I am often flabbergasted by how stubborn some people can be when they are absolutely, categorically wrong — with written evidence — but will not back down and say, “Ah, sorry, you are right.”

For the last month, I have been trying to convince a client she has not paid me. She is convinced that she has because she can see a note in her banking that she initiated an EFT (electronic funds transfer) payment to me. She is ignoring — studiously — my questions about whether she received any confirmation emails, which are always triggered when an EFT is accepted/deposited.

She and I both know she did not receive such an email.

She keeps sending me screenshots of her banking with the debit/credit columns cut off, so I can’t see that there is no debit to her account, but I know there is not one. She has not, however, done a search of her own accounts to confirm that the payment was actually withdrawn — and if she were to do this, she would confirm the payment was initiated but not completed.

I’ve suggested she used a malformed email, but until today, she would not acknowledge that. However, she tells me she sent the payment to an unmonitored email owned by my payment company. I contacted their support via chat, and they replied that there was no way her payment would have reached anyone. They checked my account and confirmed that no payment from her existed. I took a screenshot of that message and sent it to my client.

I don’t know what to do with people who would rather carry on for a month than just do a facepalm, say, “Sorry, that was a dumb move on my part,” and pay up.

I suspect she’s going to continue to refuse to pay me. I provided photography to this client previously about ten years ago and encountered the same issues; she’s very not tech-savvy and tends to go off before doing appropriate checks.

It’s so bloody frustrating for a sub-$200 payment, particularly as the listing I shot for her sold within ten days.

While I don’t own my home, a relative of mine does, and I rent from them. We had some upgrades done to the house by a contractor, and my number was given as a point of contact.

Months after the work is done, I start receiving calls for my relative. Most of them go like this.

Caller: “Hello, I am looking for [Relative] regarding the property at [address].”

Me: “[Relative] is not at this number, and I’m not able to give out their information. I live at [address]. What is this regarding?”

Caller: “We are looking to buy properties in the area—”

Me: “I’m stopping you right there. I live in this house. I am not moving, the house is not being sold, and I don’t know anyone else selling property. Please stop calling.” 

Caller: “Okay, I’ll remove you from our system.”

I’ve gotten these calls at least twice a week for months now. No matter how many times I’m told they’ve put me on the do-not-call list, I keep getting calls. Finally, I’ve had enough.

Caller: “Hi, I’m calling about [address]—”

Me: “No.”

Caller: “I’m sorry?”

Me: “I am on the national do-not-call registry. I have told your company multiple times to stop calling. If you are calling for [address], I’m going to call the police for harassment. There is no reason to be calling me about this property.”

Caller: “Well—”

Me: “No ‘well’. This is the final call I will get from you guys, or I am getting the police involved. Got it?”

Caller: “…right. I’m adding you to our ‘not interested’ list. Goodbye.”

It’s been two weeks, but I haven’t gotten a call since.

We bought our house a few years back during a small housing crash. We bought it from a single guy in a similar age range as us. He’d just lost his well-paying job and needed to downsize his life to adjust to the lower income. Maybe we should have asked why he lost his job, but honestly, we were excited to finally move into a home from flats. We were a small family: me, my wife, our two children, and a cat.

Perhaps things would have been different if we had a dog.

At first, things seemed pretty normal. Oh, there were weird noises occasionally, and unexpected occurrences. The energy bills were strangely high, and the water usage was more than we expected, but we chalked it up to a new house and our general unfamiliarity. 

For a few years, that was our new normal. Then, one day we noticed the guy we bought the house from hanging around in the neighborhood. We had thought he’d left. We tried to strike up a conversation, but he fled.

Things started feeling weird again, and we started paying more attention to the strange noises and high water and energy usage. We asked the energy company to send out an inspector to find out where the power was going. He traced our wires and found a juncture leading off to who-knows-where.

We had a survey done on our property to find where the wire was going and found a hidden underground bunker. The guy we’d sold the house to was still living there, stealing our power and water, and he had camera feeds of most of the rooms in our house. According to him, it was so he could time his arrivals and departures so that we wouldn’t see him, but I’m pretty sure he was creeping on us, and the judge agreed with me.

He was arrested for this, but we also sold the house and moved out. We didn’t feel safe anymore. We were very careful to explain the bunker to the new owner, we explained how we changed the locks, and we also made sure he knew the day the old owner was expected to get out of prison. 

The newest owner thought the bunker was pretty cool and told us he was going to turn it into his gamer-bunker. We wish him luck on it. We were refusing to sell to families with children or single women for fear of what the old owner might do when he gets out of prison.

DISCLAIMER: This story contains content of a legal nature. It is not intended as legal advice.

I keep getting calls about selling my home. My home is not on the market and hasn’t been since I bought it, so these are completely unsolicited calls. At one point, the calls were coming weekly, every Saturday or Sunday. It was always the same company calling and always the same woman calling as well — or the women calling always gave the same company name and the same name for themselves. Eventually, I got tired of telling them off every weekend. I tried blocking the number, but they kept calling with different numbers.

Finally, I tried a different tactic. It was Saturday, and my phone rang with an unknown number on the caller ID.

Me: “Hello?”

Woman: “Good morning. May I speak with [My Name], please?”

Me: “That entirely depends on who you are.”

Woman: “My name is [Woman], calling from [Company]. We have been trying to reach him about the property at [my address].”

Me: “Oh, yes. You are the one who has been calling me weekly, even after I told you I wasn’t interested in selling my home.”

Woman: “Yes, I was calling to see if you would consider selling the property.”

Me: “You know what? Sure. My price is firm at $1.3 million.”

The house is worth about $300,000, on a good day.

Woman: “Well, for a price that high, I will need to speak to my boss.”

Me: “You do that. And don’t call this number again unless you are ready to offer that amount or higher.”

With that, we hung up, and I thought that would get them to leave me alone. The next weekend came and went, and I didn’t get a call from that company, so I believed they had gotten the message. I was wrong.

The weekend after that, two weeks after the last call, the company called me again. On Saturday morning, my phone rang with an unknown number.

Me: “Hello.”

Woman: “Good morning. May I please speak with [My Name]?”

Me: “Only if I know who you are.”

Woman: “Of course. My name is [Woman], and I’m calling on behalf of [Company]…”

Me: “Wonderful! You must be ready to pay my price!”

Woman: “Um, uh, I was calling about the property at [my address], to see if you were ready to sell.”

Me: “Yes, I know. I spoke to you two weeks ago, gave you a price, and told you to only call if you were ready to pay that price. I can only assume, since you are calling me back, that your company is ready to meet the price. I was clear that it was a firm price, so I know that you don’t intend to negotiate.”

Woman: “I don’t have any notes about an offer or price…”

At that point, I remembered something important: I had an app on my phone that recorded all my calls. I had put it on my phone when I had to get into a drawn-out fight with an insurance company, which is a story for another day, but I had never deleted it.

Me: “Don’t worry about that; I have evidence of what I said.”

Woman: “We never sent anything to you with an offer…”

Me: “I am aware of that. You see, I record all my phone calls and I saved the recording of that call two weeks ago, including both my price and my instructions to not call until you wanted to match that offer.”

Woman: “And what was that number, sir?”

Me: “$1.3 million.”

Woman: “We would not pay that much for your property, sir.”

Me: “That’s a shame. This call would be evidence of harassment, then.”

Woman: “I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”

Me: “Well, if you aren’t calling to accept my offer, then you must be calling to try and harass me into lowering my price. Pretty sure that’s a felony.”

Woman: “We would do no such thing.”

Me: “And yet I have these recordings that would imply otherwise.”

Woman: “You didn’t tell me I was being recorded, so you can’t use that.”

Me: “Actually, I can. See, if you double-check my address, you’ll see that I live in the Commonwealth of Virginia, which only requires single-party consent, and I consented. That means that not only is it not a crime to record you, but my recordings can be used in both criminal and civil trials. So, who will be paying the $1.3 million? I should mention that I will only accept secured funds, like cash or a bank transfer.”

Woman: “We will not be paying anything like that! That is far too much money for your property!”

Me: “I’ll make you a deal, then: you never call me again, and I don’t take your company to court for breach of contract for calling and then backing out of the amount previously discussed.”

Woman: “You can’t do that!”

Me: “Try me, I dare you.”

With that, she hung up on me. So far, it’s been six months without getting another call from them. For the record, aside from Virginia being a single-party consent state for recording phone calls, I have no idea if anything that I said about contracts or harassment was true; please don’t take it as legal advice. But it seems to have scared them off for now.