Perhaps it depends on the geographic location or the number of clients they take on in a year, but for whatever reason, some realtors encounter a lot of bizarre things on the job. (My first real estate pro, in her decades of trying to help people buy and sell houses, witnessed so much crazy stuff that she wrote an entire book about that subject. True story!)
So, what are the weirdest, funniest situations realtors have experienced at work? Well, the best way to find out is to consult strangers on the Internet. Many agents, sharing comfortably with online anonymity, have shared their wildest stories—a lot of tales that, frankly, would have been uncomfortable to witness in person but are super entertaining with distance and the passage of time.
It’s hard to narrow down a list of favorites, given that Reddit is filled with realtor anecdotes—scroll around long enough, and you’ll read about awkwardly open bathrobes, terrifying images carved in Styrofoam insulation, and unexpected hogs. But certain stories rise to the top. Here are five classic examples of reality gone surreal.
1. The pentagram
In one case, a realtor wrote that they showed a house to a friendly but “eccentric” couple—and everyone left a bit freaked out.
“We walked into a vacant home, and it had nothing out of the ordinary at first,” they wrote. “First words out of the wife’s mouth are ‘Can you feel it?’ I’m like, ‘Feel what?’ Husband responds, ‘Yes, I can feel it.’ She says to me, ‘There is negative energy in this home. Something has happened here.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, okay.’ We walked into the backyard, and there is a pentagram painted on the home and burned into the yard. She’s like, ‘I knew it. I knew it!’ And I’m standing there dumbfounded like. ‘WTF!’ I guess I’m not in tune with the spirit world.”
2. The unbothered underwear man
This one is more unnatural than supernatural, but still…
“Hosted an open house for another agent,” someone shared. “Home had tenants in it that were supposed to be gone. One of them came home 2 hours early and proceeded to strip down to his underwear, sit on the couch, turn on the TV, and smoke for the remainder of the open house.”
3. The naked vacationer
“Vacant” doesn’t always mean vacant—at least not in this case.
“I was showing a ‘vacant’ lake house once,” one Redditor wrote.” No furniture, no utilities. I had shown every room but the back bedroom. Middle of the day, we open the door, and there’s a man sleeping face down completely uncovered in his birthday suit on an inflatable mattress. We slowly backed out and left. After a few calls, it was determined that the owner’s brother had decided to take a mini vacation to the lake house and hadn’t told anybody.”
4. The creepy note
One Redditor recalled doing a “video tour” for some out-of-town clients at a “fairly remote cabin.” Like in our other example, the owner—who’d stayed behind to “wrangle” the dogs—is described as friendly but “eccentric.” But that didn’t prepare the realtor for this strange situation.
“She’s following behind me to answer questions as I’m videoing and narrating,” they shared. “I get to the bedroom, and as I’m panning around the room, there is a sticky note that says ‘Help me. I’m in danger.’ I immediately am freaked out and paused my video to check with her, and she says, ‘I’m fine. It’s just a joke.’ Definitely weirded out, I go upstairs to video the second and third bedrooms. In the first bedroom, I find her grown-ass son asleep in the bed, so I awkwardly leave the room and go into the next one. There I find her grown-ass daughter laying in bed, playing on her phone. Just so weird, and needless to say my clients passed on the house, but we had some good laughs about it. The house still hasn’t sold and has since been re-listed as a FSBO [For Sale By Owner].”
5. The non-nefarious break-in
We’re mixing things up for the last entry—in this case, the realtor themselves stirred up what sounds like a wacky sitcom plot. It happened 10 years ago, when they were new to the job, showing their second home ever. They were so “hyper-focused” on the client’s questions, they wound up locking their purse inside the house.
“My Jeep wasn’t locked, so I got in and pretended I was looking down, returning texts on my invisible phone,” they wrote. “I looked up to wave as they pulled out. Once they turned the corner, I stalked around the house like a burglar trying every door and window, so worried a neighbor would see me and confront me or call the police or, worse, someone else would pull up for a showing. I finally found an unlocked window behind a hedge and hoisted myself up an uncomfortable height to flop my body through the window, landing on a table and knocking over a lamp. Somehow nothing broke, [and] I put everything back then unlocked the Supra [lock box] again so I could lock back up, chill AF like it never even happened, other than the huge dirt stripe across my shirt from balancing precariously, ass out the window. So yeah, I broke into the second home I showed.”
Amazing. If you’re reading this as someone planning to sell their home, you may want to follow some expert tips on the staging process—from painting interior spaces to adding key accessories. One thing you will probably want to avoid, if possible: being naked inside, face down on an inflatable mattress, during a showing.
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