Fancy house

Shopping for a house was an enlightening experience.  My internal voice definitely yelled 

CLASSISM!!!

many, many times.  The most obvious culprit, I think, was the letter that we were asked to come up with the first time we put in a bid on a house.  We had only been actively looking for a week when an amazing house came on the market, priced way under its realistic value.  It had a ton of room, a basement I could stand up in with room to spare, and was right next to a subway.  We ended up in a bidding war with another potential buyer, and our agent asked us if we wanted to submit a letter to the owner to try to increase our chance of being accepted.

I have to give my agent credit here.  She made it clear that these letters have problems, and in some areas they are illegal, but she had an obligation to tell us our options.  She sent us some samples, and those samples made me angry and sad at the same time.

All the samples were staged photos with staged stories, all saying the same thing:  We are a conventional, attractive young couple, doing a conventional life, and we are so grateful for the opportunity to bid on your home.  The grovelling was the worst.

If I was being honest my letter would say "My spouse, child, and my girlfriend are moving in together.  We are making an unconventional sort of family that makes us really happy, and I think this house will give us a great place to do that."

Sending exactly the right letter can add significantly to the effective value of your bid.  Sending my honest letter could easily erase my bid entirely.  This is why these letters are not allowed some places, of course, because they often end up enabling bigotry.  White people who own houses preferentially sell to other white people.  Other privilege ends up working the same way, naturally, and since straight, conventional, etc. people own a disproportionate share of the houses, this puts another barrier in the way of people who aren't that.

In the end it didn't matter.  The seller and the buyer discovered that their mothers had the same name,  and that was enough to convince them it was fate, and we didn't get the house.  In the end, that was a good thing, as the house we did get was not as good (mostly because the basement is short), but the location is better and the price was far more manageable.  There was no second bidding war as we were the only bidders the second time around, so we didn't have to do face down the letter thing again.

I can see the angles.  I could have just made up the perfect letter, bought into the classist bullshit, and sold my ass off.  I know how to sell!  I know exactly what lies to tell, should I want to.  Instead, all I wanted to do was to write down "I am offering you a ton of money, take it or leave it, but don't expect me to grovel for your damnable charity, or pretend that your house is going to continue on being a bastion of your values."

When we sold the condo our agent told us that the bidder was a mathie of some sort or other.  My response was "I don't care in the slightest.  Show me the money."  It turns out that I am the sort of person that I want to deal with in real estate.  Who knew?