I Screamed and Ran, Called 911.’ Three Home Showings That Went South Real Fast
We asked three real-estate agents if they’d ever feared for their lives while on the job
3 min
Q: Have you ever feared for your life while showing a home?
Elizabeth Thompson, real-estate agent, The Agency Los Altos, Los Altos, Calif.
I was representing the seller of a townhome under contract for $1.2 million. A day before the closing, he called to tell me a window was missing. When I arrived, I found that a small sliding window was completely gone, both frame and glass. I thought that my stager had accidentally broken it and took the frame out in order to have the glass repaired. But the seller also mentioned that there was a stain on the carpet in one of the bedrooms. We went upstairs and saw a bright yellow stain next to the closet. I got on my hands and knees to smell the stain. It was not the colour of urine and didn’t smell that way. We went downstairs to discuss a solution for the missing window and then heard a bang upstairs. We went up to check, going from room to room. We finally got to the bedroom with the stain, and when I slid the closet door open, I saw an aluminium container on the floor, like the kind takeout food comes in. I looked to my left, and there was a man standing in the closet. My client and I screamed and ran, called 911 and the intruder was ultimately arrested after he climbed down the balcony to escape. He turned out to be a homeless guy with a 20-page rap sheet, but the scariest part is that when I was kneeling on the ground smelling the stain, he was about 6 inches away from me on the other side of the closet door. To this day, when I open a closet, I still have a gut reaction.
Lindsay Jackman, real-estate agent, Century 21 North Homes Realty, Gig Harbor, Wash.
I am a policeman’s daughter, and now a policeman’s wife, so I have a very thorough process to vet buyers. I never meet a stranger at a vacant house, for example, and always perform public records searches on sellers before going to a listing appointment. But I was about to take a listing on an older four-bedroom home that was used as a rental property, and the sellers were acquaintances of mine. The house had the potential to be listed for upward of $1 million, and I was fairly new in the industry, so it was exciting. I was meeting the sellers at the house for a walk-through to determine its value and whether any updates were needed prior to listing it. During the tour, I learned that the tenant was an ex-police officer with substance abuse issues and a mental-health problem. He also wasn’t paying rent. When we got to the primary bedroom, the door was closed. The seller knocked and opened it, and the tenant, wearing just underwear and a tee shirt, was standing inside the doorway, holding a gun and demanding that we leave. The seller at first tried to calm him down, but then he pulled out a gun from his waistband. The situation was unraveling, and I was petrified. I bolted for the door. I can still remember the pounding in my chest as I fumbled for my car keys. The seller came out a few minutes later, and we all drove to the nearest public place. The seller had known it would be a volatile situation, but he put me in danger and never apologised or gave me the listing. Now I have a new rule for safety: No tenants present in the house, ever.
Eli Faitelson, real-estate agent, Compass Florida, Miami Beach
About three years ago, I was working with the sellers of a single-family home on the water in Miami Beach that was listed for about $1.5 million. I got to the home an hour early to set up for a showing, and I noticed that the ceiling near the kitchen had a huge bubble in it. There was water all over the floor. The air conditioner was up on the roof, and it was leaking, so it had rotted all the wood. The sellers had been in Spain for about a month, so they had no idea what was going on in the house. I started cleaning up, and I was also playing with the AC, trying to figure it out, when I heard the water start to drip a little faster. Then the whole ceiling collapsed on my head. There was wood and AC equipment all over the floor. I was pretty close to getting really injured. I was terrified. I had debris all over me, and I was freaking out. My arm was injured, and I was in shock, but I was still able to cancel the showing.
—Edited from interviews by Robyn A. Friedman
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Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities
2 min
Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.
This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.
“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.
“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”
Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.
He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.
“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.
“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”
Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.
Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.
“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.
“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?
“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”
At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.
“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”
And there’s no AI option for that.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
