Photo by fullres
Real estate agents can be arseholes sometimes. A few years ago, being first time home renters, Naomi and I were conned into paying double commission by this chow ah beng of an agent, and last year, we were treated to a siao char bor show by this independent agent who got her husband to talk to and abuse me on the phone when I called to ask that the apartment be fumigated before we moved in (it was infested with ticks from a previous tenant’s dog).
We’ve just started the merry dance of house-hunting again, seeing as it’s a little under a year to go before our lease expires, and yesterday was spent poring over the Classifieds and deciphering realtor acronyms like IT, CT, SD and 4D.
‘IT’ means ‘inter-terrace’; ‘CT’ means ‘corner terrace’; ‘SD’ means ‘semi-detached’, and ‘4D’ means ‘houses that only lottery winners can afford’.
We viewed a few properties and began to understand what realtors really mean, when they describe numbers of bedrooms in private dwellings as ‘3+1’ and ‘4+1’.
‘3+1’ means ‘three real bedrooms and a hole in the wall for your domestic helper’, or ‘three real bedrooms and a hole in the wall for storing your junk and your domestic helper’.
When I remarked “wah, so small” on seeing the five foot by three foot by seven foot hole in a yet to be completed house, the realtor attending to us, sweating in his shirt and tie, defended its design, saying, “but it’s just for your maid”.
Being in a reasonably good mood, I responded, “but our maid is life-sized” to which he pointed out, “but this house is different, this maid’s room got own toilet”.
The en-suite makes a big difference, I suppose. Imagine prison cells without them. Crap.
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