Arthur Michaels stared at the cracked screen of his smartphone, his thumb hovering over the “Decline” button. It was 7:45 PM on a rainy Tuesday, the kind of evening where the damp cold seeps straight into your bones. As one of the city’s top-producing real estate agents, his time was billed in precious increments.
The email sitting in his inbox was from an 82-year-old woman named Marian Woodard. The subject line read simply: Property Listing – 142 Willow Lane.
It wasn’t the address that made Arthur snort out loud; it was the requested listing price of $2.2 million. Willow Lane was a cozy, working-class pocket of the suburbs filled with post-war bungalows where the absolute highest-priced sale over the last three years had been $245,000. Arthur fired off a polite reply with strict market comparables, hoping that would be the end of it.