Real estate agents must sell their soul to the devil

They are so fucking evil and annoying.

We had a list of 6 houses to view on the weekend, 5 of which had been raised. I tried to contact each of the agents before the weekend to ask them if the downstairs was legal height, and none of them would tell me. They just told me I was welcome to come and measure. Here's a thought, numbnuts - perhaps I don't want to waste my time driving all the way there, only to walk through the door, measure the ceiling height and walk out again! I fail to see why it's so fucking difficult to find out what the ceiling height is and get back to me. Grr.

So that's exactly what happened with those 5 houses. None of them were legal height downstairs, so we wasted half a day and lots of fuel driving around to all of them. And one agent even had the nerve to argue with me about it! One of the houses was a very old house which had been built in underneath, and the living areas had been moved downstairs so just bedrooms were upstairs. The bedrooms were fine - they had 10' ceilings. The downstairs was another matter. It was only 2100mm in there. The problem being legal height for a habitable room is 2400mm. So the kitchen was legal, but nothing else was. He asked us what we thought of the property, and we told him we'd probably like it if it was legal height. He then said it was legal height when it was built in, which I know for a fact is a lie. I told him heights had never been that low, and in fact up to the 50s were 8'6", then became 8', and are now 7'10.5" (or 2400mm). He just looked at me, and then tried to save face by saying the owners could only work with what they had! Here's a thought - if it's not legal height, don't build it in!! Morons. There's no way anyone other than a complete idiot is going to buy it when it's not even legal height. If there's a fire or something else, no insurance company is going to pay out once they show up and realise you've been living in a non-habitable space. Idiots.

We did have a small win, though. Because we were induced into signing the last contract because we were told it was legal height underneath, we requested the real estate agent pay us the money we expended on building & pest and legal fees/disbursements. They refused, so we got our solicitors to send them a letter claiming misrepresentation of the property (we had a print out of the advertisement which said it was legal height, etc), and threatening to advise the Office of Fair Trading, as well as take them to court. They must have gotten legal advice and told they were screwed, because they paid us back all of our costs. Wahoo!

I still hate real estates. I don't even understand why anyone uses them in this day and age. Take some nice photos of your property, get a valuation, then put an ad on realestate.com.au. Done and done. Why bother with an agent who's going to take 5% of the sale value? I don't get it. And they don't do anything anyway. They never know anything about the property, and are just generally very unhelpful to potential buyers. William and I have already said when we sell, we'll just sell it ourselves and save ourselves the hassle.