Carol and Dortch Oldham

My husband Dortch and I specialize in West Nashville specifically West Meade and Hillwood real estate. This is a wonderful area convenient to Vanderbilt University and area hospitals, Green Hills shopping and restaurants, the best private schools, I-40 to head quickly downtown, Music Row, and West End offices and businesses. It's a wonderful neighborhood convenient to downtown where the homes are large mostly built in the 50's and 60's, many recently renovated on beautiful acre plus treed lots. Our clients enjoy the privacy and the uniqueness of this wonderful area of Nashville where my husband and I have happily lived for more than 20 years.

The problem with our area from a vacant home Realtor point of view is the same thing that makes the area interesting: the homes are large and so are the lots. They are 50 years old, although many have been renovated. What can happen to your listing on a secluded hillside lot when the owner has moved out of state or at least out of Nashville with only occasional visits to town? As we have discovered during the past few months when showings are extremely scarce. Almost anything!

Even the most diligent Realtors and we are certainly diligent Realtors find it difficult to keep up with a bunch of vacant properties. We even live in the West Meade Hillwood area only minutes from most of our listings and still it is challenging. With showings few and far between, as they have been in our market lately, it is hard to keep tabs on a 4700 sq. ft. home on almost 2 acres. The next time you visit an entire colony of foxes could be setting up a commune on the carport!

Actually our most recent problem was not foxes but skunks. This listing was high on a hill and the owners had moved to Jackson, Tn. near Memphis. Our feedback responses read something like this. When we walked into the Entry Foyer, it smelled like a herd of skunks had set up shop there. Not exactly the atmosphere you want to set for selling a sophisticated West Meade ranch.

Surely it could not be skunks we thought. It had to be a gas leak, something mildewing, food left in the fridge or whatever. But just on the chance that all those Realtors might be right we called a Critter Control company. After much searching we discovered there was an actual company that would come out to our listing and figure out what type of wildlife was invading it. They were extremely knowledgeable about all forms of wildlife in Middle Tennessee, told excellent stories and performed thieir diagnosis for a very modest price.

Our skunk nightmares were confirmed. While not exactly confirmed because the critter control guy would have to bait our skunks with eggs or whatever and actually catch them to confirm it but he was very sure. How do you keep skunks from spraying a vacant house? In my 20 years in luxury real estate sales I had never been faced with this question.

My husband and I discovered the answer by trial and error. Make the home look occupied. Wildlife is afraid to approach an occupied house. Floor lamps were installed by the front Living Room windows and the back Den windows and they burned night and day. No more skunk smell. No more Realtor feedback saying their buyer was immediately turned off when they walked in the front door of our listing. Refreshed and fragrant our empty hillside ranch sold almost immediately to a California buyer moving in to work in the music business.

Our beautiful all glass 1600 sq. ft. of decks contemporary on a gorgeous hillside in the Hillwood area of Nashville presented our next vacant house problem. Our first showing in more than a month by an innocent realtor in our own Keller Williams office prompted the next unpleasant discovery. My co-agent and husband, Dortch, dutifully ran over to our listing to warm up the house , turn on the lights and make it bright, warm and welcoming. He came back to the office to report to me that the house smelled very musty.

Very musty did not sound like an adjective that would make someone want to buy a $600,000 house in this market. I immediately went over to Febreeze it. Opening a downstairs closet I gasped. What were those large green polka dot circles covering the inside of the closet? And what is this? As I back out of the closet my feet feel like they are squishing on the carpet. The beautiful new $3000 Frieze carpet is showing my footprints in big wet patterns. Oops! Water damage. Four days ago Nashville had it's first Fall rain it lasted 10 hours. Do we have a roof leak? A stopped up gutter? How I am going to tell my friends the owners who have moved several states away and left us in charge of their much loved home?

We assemble the Carol and Company team of three, Dortch and David join me in assessing the damage. They cut off the water supply to the house after they decide the water is not coming from above but from below. We call a plumber and the culprit appears to be an outside faucet no one would have noticed that broke inside the wall. The way this home was built 50 years ago and the way this faucet was installed it would cost several thousand dollars to replace it. It is just capped off. No one is going to notice one missing outside faucet on a house that has several outside faucets.

Our sellers have no blame for us just relief that we found the broken faucet when we did. They tell us that bailing the water out of their home is truly beyond what they expected of their Realtors and promise to take us out to dinner when they come in to Nashville to thank us.

Meanwhile we are organizing contractors to cut out drywall, moisture control people to make sure there is no lurking mold or mildew, and carpet layers to redo the carpet.

This all makes me worry even more about the banks and all their foreclosure houses. Who is watching these homes as they sit there vacant and neglected. What is going to happen to them? Are their values going to tumble even more because there is no one paying attention.

We have been recently bidding on a short sell home with a buyer. During the 3 months Wells Fargo has kept us waiting for an answer all the copper tubing was stripped out of the outside heat and air units, the lovely outdoor lanterns my buyer thought she was paying for have all been broken and the 5 acres of land is grown up to the point that bushhogging may not even help. When the bank came back to her she countered them at $25,000 less. In her opinion it was not the same house and the real estate market was not the same market. We are still waiting to hear on this one.

I'm longing for the good old days when West Meade, Hillwood, West Nashville real estate sold in less than 30 days normally with several contracts. This 120 plus days are turning us all into property managers!