My Near Brush With Infamy

Fifteen years ago, when we decided to build a new house in Hillsboro, we put our house in Beaverton up for sale. We talked to three realtors. The first guy wanted to list it at $135,000. He claimed he could sell it in a day. He had big, fat three ring binder full of deals he had closed in days or even hours. Thanks, but no thanks. The second was a lady from Coldwell Banker who wanted to list it for $145,000. That probably would have been the smart thing to do. Then we talked to our local neighborhood realtor lady, Maxine. She thought she could get $155,000 for it. As we weren't in any particular hurry, after all, our new house is just starting construction and won't be ready for six months, let's give her a shot. Maybe she will come through.

Well, time went by and nothing happened. Months go by and we are starting to wonder. Finally she puts together a deal for the full price, but we will have to carry a second mortgage for $20,000. This isn't something I was looking for, but it gets us out from under our mortgage, so we agree. The idea is the owner will make payments for a few years until his credit rating improves and he can refinance the whole shebang and we would be paid off.

All goes well for a couple of years and then he stops making payments. Disaster hit this guy. His father dies, his son contracts brain cancer and dies, and he has a heart attack. He recovers from his heart attack, but now he is not well enough to continue running his carpet cleaning business, so he falls back on his former profession of accounting.

I talk to him, and I talk to a lawyer. I could foreclose on him, but first I would have to buy his first mortgage from the bank, which means I would have come up with a 100 and some odd thousand dollars. This gives me pause. I decide I will let him slide for awhile, and it's a good thing I do.

The next week this guy is the subject of Margie Boule's column. Margie is our local paper's official bleeding heart columnist. That's all I would have needed: to be portrayed as the black hatted villain in the heart wrenching tale of woe. I could just see the headlines: hard-hearted local man casts hard working immigrant family out into the street.

Eventually, after about a year or so, he got back on his feet and resumed making payments. A couple years after that he got a new loan (with a lower interest rate) from a local bank, and paid us off. And Margie never called me on the carpet.