Ghostly tales from real estate agents that are even scarier than this housing market.
Real estate agent Arto Poladian knew that taking on the $2 million listing in Los Angeles could be a challenge — even though it was 2021 and the market was extremely hot.
Poladian, who works for Redfin, says he personally “never dealt with anything freaky or scary” in the LaBianca house. “If I didn’t know the history of the home, it never would have crossed my mind,” he says. Although he said he wasn’t concerned about ghosts popping out of corners or books flying off shelves, he was anxious about the property possibly attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Kelly Moye, a Compass real estate agent in Boulder, Colo., keeps a list of go-to professionals who help make her listings as appealing as possible: furniture stagers, floor repair people, lighting designers — and two “home energy clearers.” Both of the psychic-like professionals in Moye’s Rolodex offer roughly the same service. For $300, they’ll take between four and five hours to do an elaborate ritual, going into a trance-like state to “communicate” with the space. In this case, the clearer uncovered that past owners of the home had illegally made alcohol during Prohibition, and the basement had been the site of a deadly police raid.
But the client declined the help. It turned out the family liked the ghost and had named her Lucy. “Just ’cause there is a spirit presence nearby does not necessarily mean something’s wrong or it’s a bad thing,” Moye says.to a buyer, although most don’t require sharing information about deaths or other “stigmatizing” events on the property. California, which has the strictest statute, calls for sellers to disclose all deaths going back three years.