GALLOWAY REAL ESTATE

This was an awful experience for my wife and I. We listed our second home with Century that was in Oswego city. We had purchased another house and had moved out, so the house was completely clean and available to be shown at any time and it was. Early on in our experience we received a cash offer right away from someone probably looking to rent the house out. I believe this was within the first month, but the buyer backed out because he said he wasn't aware that there was no back yard after looking at the old survey. This is surprising because there is no back door and there are fences that would prevent anyone from getting to the back of the property in any case. with all of that you would assume there was no back yard, but I digress. Eventually things went back to ordinary with people coming to see the house, but with all of the traffic they told us we had, we were surprised that we were not receiving any offers. When we explored our house for ourselves online, we found that at century21.com, the listing was inaccurate stating that the property had a garage, a pellet stove, all copper plumbing, and numerous other things that were not true. To my understanding of the property it did at one point have a garage (it had been converted into a bed room and mud room) and a pellet stove (the chimney was still there), but not for the entire time I owned it and to make it worse, I walked the agents through the house telling them everything that had been done to it since we bought it. So to note, I had to find the errors myself and address them to the real-tor who in my opinion did not do their homework and posted old information. Either way, I brought this discrepancy to their attention and they said they would promptly fix it. The next time I looked at my house online, there was a picture of someone else's back porch added to my house which is miraculous, because my house doesn't even have a back yard, it is a corner lot and the neighbor has the back yard. This again, I brought to the attention of the real-tor and the picture was removed, and it must be realized that people are viewing the home wondering where is this garage, pellet stove, and back porch among other things. Not too long after that I got on and looked at my house again to make sure the picture was gone and I found that the posting still said that the house had a garage and pellet stove and other things, and I promptly called William Galloway because I had asked for this to be fixed months before from the real-tor who was assigned to my property and it had not been fixed. I was told that (and I confirmed myself) that the listing was correct on Century21galloway.com, but not on century21.com, and I was told that it is more difficult for the lower level real-tors to fix errors on the actual centruy21.com website and that he would fix it. I specifically went in this time and showed them the difference on the two sites so they could fix it and they assured me they would. Eventually we got an offer from a buyer who was pre-approved to purchase the property and we accepted the offer. We went through the necessary steps in selling the property and the buyer had put down a $500 earnest deposit so we were fairly sure they were going to go through with it and not end up backing out like the previous buyer. Then we were told to wait as the bank commitment letter was to be issued. We were told that it would be a 20 to 30 day process for this and we patiently waited to hear from someone if anything had progressed. I waited until about 35 days after we were informed about the commitment letter to contact the real-tor myself to find out what was going on. She told me that the buyer had a small issue and that they were only about 10 to 15 days into the commitment letter process and therefore we had to wait again. Note here that I had to contact them to find out what was going on. After the 15 days, on the exact last day of it, I sent her a text message about what was going on and she replied that she had already inquired with the buyer where they were at and was waiting to hear back. That was a Friday, and on Monday, she asked me to give her a call when I had a chance. When I did, she informed me that the buyers bank would not finance them and they had to back out of the contract, but that they wanted to see if we would do a land contract with them. I wanted to look into the land contract myself and asked her about some of the details. Among those details was the commission, which I was told would still need to be paid. This seemed very unfair to me as the commission and closing costs would be more than the down payment and I had hired the real-tor to sell my house, not to get me a rent to own contract which is in essence what a land contract is in legal terms, or a lease with option to buy. Both of which add risk to the seller and I was informed by my attorney that a foreclosure involved with a land contract is extremely expensive, so he suggested the lease with option to buy, which is handled the same as a rental agreement. I inquired with the bank who held the mortgage and they wouldn't allow it without jumping thought a lot of hoops which had a total cost of 13,415 dollars to me, 5,955 of which I would get back over time, the rest would be a loss and closing costs on top of that. Obviously I said no to that and at the date I was told the sale had fallen through I looked up my house on century21.com again just for the heck of it and low and behold, the listing was still wrong. It had never been fixed. I copied and pasted the entire page and took a screen shot of it just in case I ever had to prove that they hadn't fixed it. I opted to write a review of them instead hoping that other people would be aware that you have to keep an eye on them and apparently babysit them so that they will do their job. They never offered any sort of recompense for their errors, still expected their commission for a non-sale land contract, and were slow to communicate with me with developments in the sale. In the end, my contract ended pretty much on the same day that the sale was for certain a failure. They asked if I would sign with them again to try to sell the property and I declined as politely as I could. At this time I am not sure if I am going to sign with another real-tor or try to sell it myself. I may even consider renting the property long term but who knows right now. I do know that I would not recommend them to anyone I know.