Sometimes you receive a bit of education, and you wonder how you made it to this stage in life without ever getting in trouble for things you did in the past. Well, I do. Don't know about other people. We had our annual updates class this morning, required for keeping our real estate licenses current. The slideshow came directly from the state commission, and the instructors who give the updates classes (in this case, my managing broker is still my primary educator as well) are not allowed to change anything. One of the first things covered was the topic of "love letters," and how the commission really wants that not to be a thing anymore.
I've written them (the Mr and I for our own property purchases), and I've been totally permissive with my clients who wanted to write them in the past. I didn't see anything wrong with them in a hot market, other than the risk of a seller being inundated with them, and them starting to all sound trite and repetitive. I have seen the light. Love letters are the personal statements that accompany offers to buy, and are usually things like "wow I love your house; I can see me and my dog living here." At least, that's how innocuous they ought to be. Instead, according to the real estate commission, they run right up to and usually over the line into revealing protected class information according to the Fair Housing Act, and that's where the trouble lies. For example, if you are a seller, and you've decided you want to accept an offer based on a compelling letter from a heterosexual married couple with children, and you go on to dismiss offers with letters from a childless couple, a single parent, a gay family, or some combo thereof, you open yourself up to the possibility of being sued for discrimination. And even if you didn't use any of those criteria, but received love letters that revealed details like that, how do you prove that the offer you chose was based on price and the ability to pay, or the likelihood of reaching closing, and not protected status from the personal statements? Even if you can prove it, you might still incur legal costs to do so. To avoid the whole process, there are remedies a broker can rely on, like discouraging clients from writing them, or getting permission from sellers not to present them. I think about the letter we wrote for this house--retiring from military, moving back to home county, need a place for our handicapped dog--and see how easily we could have dipped a toe into a Fair Housing dilemma.
I was a little worried how this class would go. A year ago, I was starting to deteriorate, just entering the neural issues that sucked up most of last year. I couldn't focus on the class, and I really couldn't focus on the test. I missed something like four out of ten last year, and even when I stayed late to go over stuff with the boss, I was foggy-headed. Flash to this year, insomnia has been rough for weeks, and it has only been a couple of weeks since I was up until five in the morning, throwing off my sleep cycle ever since. I took baclofen the last two nights, not just for sore muscles (but definitely for that too), but also because when I'm not used to it, those pills help me sleep. I was able to rise before 6 two days in a row, to get where I needed to be. I was wide awake for class, contributed to the conversation coherently, and this time around I made a perfect score on the test. What a relief. Was tired as heck on the way home though. It was a gray day, which just made me even more mellow on the drive, even when facing that view I love so much, the long shot of the mountains as I approach town.
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