…and her name is Cindy. Cindy Bergen that is, as in Prudential Fox and Roach Real Estate. Yep, you got it…this is a shameless little plug for my friend and real estate agent who I met up with a few days ago to do an impromptu photo shoot with. I can’t give this fine girl enough props. We first met in the fall of 2006 when Sky and I decided to casually start looking for a new house. We had two kids, a dog, some fish and a partridge in a pear tree…all of us stuffed into our starter modest home that we basically outgrew nine years prior when we were literally just starting. Our yard had grown into a landscaper’s worst nightmare, every square inch of storage was crammed with basically junk that we were never going use again but were still holding onto ”just in case” and we listened to the constant perpetual sound of our very nice, yet hillbilly neighbors drive dirtbikes around their house with their made-made track of mud. I mean who does that? We are in the suburbs of Philly, not the wide open plains of Idaho, for crying out loud. I am not sure if it was the monotony of their engines or the hundreds of mice that set up camp in our attic (we would hear them scratching around in our duct work…eewwww!), but we decided to bite the bullet and actually call an agent to get the house-hunting ball rolling.
However, we were more than a little gun-shy.
We had tried to move when I was pregnant with Megan. We decided to use a family friend as our agent. Big mistake. He had sold us our first home, and for two real-estate rookies like ourselves, he met our needs for the most part.
Can’t say the same for round two. It was painful to look at houses with him. Sky and I would pretty much say in no un-certain terms, that we hated the house that were looking at. He would then proceed to drone on for an hour, inspecting every nook and cranny of a house that there was no way in H-E-double hockey sticks that we were going to buy. This agony lasted five painful months. We hosted our own open houses (who does that???), made our own marketing flyers, begged him to submit ads in the weekly newspaper and did all of our own research for the houses that we wanted to look at through realtor.com. Our house that we were selling was getting zilcho traffic and the houses that he was taking us to were not meeting our needs. The final straw…after five long months, this agent finally made us a sales flyer and his closing tag line read…”This house is just write for you”. Write instead of right. It was that moment of iliteracy that sealed the deal for us. We were done with this bozo. Done with the housing market. We rolled up our sleeves and washed our hands of every last bit of house showings, intense internet searches and faded hope.
We ended our contract with our realtor, dragged our defeated hearts home, plucked the “For Sale” sign from the weedy grass and waited for our second child to arrive.
And listened to some more dirt bikes. Ugh.
Fast foward a year and a half. I was getting urges to try the whole house hunting ordeal again. Kind of like childbirth, I forgot what hell the process was. I started to drive around, peering at houses from the street distance and dreamed. I spotted a house that caught my eye in particular. I remember it had a trellis and brick-paved walkway that made my heart skip a little faster. Yes, I think my family of four could live there quite nicely, thank you very much. The agent on the Prudential Fox and Roach sign read “Cindy Bergen”. I decided to give her a ring that very second, taking the plunge without even talking much to Sky.
Of course that house was under contract, couldn’t have been that easy, now could it? But Cindy started showing me a house or two and we found ourselves dabbling in the hunt again. I immediately liked Cindy…she was unassuming, was a hard-worker and told things as she saw them…a girl after my own heart. We clicked immediately. If I told her I hated something, we moved on. She listened to us and worked for us. However, Sky, my ever-knowing realist, decided that he wanted to wait until the following spring to look so that we could pounce on a fresh market. Once again, cold feet numbed our progress. Cindy patiently and respectfully bode us farewell until the spring thaw.
Eight months later, we reconnected with Cindy and the hunt began again. She immediately put our house on the market which made us nervous, but we were all in agreement that it was the best thing to do financially. Cindy and her team leader, impressed us beyond a doubt with their sales pitch. It was a far cry from “this house is write for you”.
She had our little starter home sold in five weeks at double the price that we paid for it nine years prior. We were thrilled and set off to pack. But to go where?? The selling seemed to be the easy part. The buying, not so much. I swear, we dragged that poor girl through the mud. She must have taken us to see over 50 houses…all of them either falling short of our needs for one reason or another or falling short of our budget. We went through five different contract write-ups with Cindy for five different houses. All of them, I decorated in my mind…picking out paint colors, envisioning where we were going to put the Christmas tree, seeing my kids in my mind riding their bikes on the wonderfully coveted, flat driveway…you know…I did everything I was not supposed to.
I became emotionally attached.
There were tears, disappointment, many cell phone calls and late night appointments. And through it all, Cindy worked and worked. She researched endless possibilites for us, endured bidding wars and even answered phone calls from us on her wedding day (we didn’t know that she was getting married that day or else we would have never called!). She was dedicated to finding us the house that was just perfect for us…all neatly packaged and tied with a bow.
And she did. Our new home is so us. We just love it…and we love her for helping us find it.
So if you are in the market, to find yourself a new home, call on my girl Cindy.
She will be right for you.
I swear, I really am a good mom. Pinky swear.
