Merle Dunson

Merle was scatter-brained, unprepared, and generally unprofessional throughout the purchase process. Toward closing, she gave our realtor the excuse that she was taking care of her sick adult daughter and her daughter's two young children while their father was deployed, and this was causing her to be disorganized. While I sympathize with the situation, when you are making deals with other people's money, you need to get your act together or refer clients to another realtor at your company until you are able to function professionally. Merle left us and our realtor frustrated and unsure of how clearly our information was being conveyed to the sellers. On more than one occasion, I almost went to Merle's company (REMAX) to complain, and we even considered talking to the sellers directly. Some of the problems we encountered: A realtor guides their clients in pricing a house realistically. Merle led her clients to overprice their house based on it having a partially finished garage. This became the main sticking point in negotiations, with Merle arguing that the garage added substantial value because its door could be removed, creating extra living space. We explained that the house would then lack a garage (!) making it undesirable and difficult to sell later. Merle claimed that other realtors would have counted the garage square footage in the house total ? untrue, since any buyer would be angry to arrive at a house and find that 400 square feet of a stated 2400 was garage. Merle argued repeatedly for the value of the garage, but when the sellers finally removed all their stored junk and their two large hairy dogs, the garage is a terrible mess: dirty, adhesive on the floor from where carpet was pulled up, holes in walls, a large space across the bottom of walls left from removing the carpet, filthy doors with damage from the dogs pawing at them, and wires running haphazardly across walls from the sellers handyman efforts. We are now paying $1000 to have the garage repaired and painted so it doesn't look like a disaster zone. Merle listed the home's square footage at 2000+ despite tax records saying less. She argued that we should pay a higher price per square foot than we offered because she swore she measured the house herself and it was exactly 2000. We have now had the house appraised by the notoriously strict Veteran's Association (for our VA loan) and the house is 1939 square feet. Substantially less than 2000. Merle lost track of pricing during the bidding process ? she repeatedly told our realtor ?I don't have the paperwork with me, but I think we're only this far off...? Perhaps a realtor shouldn't talk prices with the paperwork on hand. She was off by $2000 one time and $3800 another! The entire bidding process was stressful and confusing because Merle couldn't keep the numbers straight. Merle was slow to return phone calls and emails. Our realtor had to hound her, and she didn't follow through on several occasion when she said she'd get back to us. To top everything off, Merle showed up late to closing, which SHE had scheduled for late Friday afternoon, and then didn't want to give us the house keys because money couldn't be transferred by the lawyers until Monday. She literally said, ?Well, they don't really own the house yet, and what if it burns down over the weekend?? Perhaps she shouldn't have scheduled closing for 4:00pm on Friday then? We are pleased with our house, but Merle made the buying process very unpleasant, and our realtor repeatedly apologized for all the problems, saying that in 10 years she'd never had this much trouble with a purchase. We also can't really be sure that we paid a fair price since Merle lied or was mistaken about the square footage.