True Story: Wrong Number

One day at the office, I was "sitting on floor", which is not a euphemism for a time out, it was merely my turn to answer the phones if anyone called the office about a listing or wanted general real estate advice. The phone rang and the receptionist patched him through to me and shrugged saying, "He said it's a wrong number but, I don't know." Great, I thought.

I picked up the extension and sure enough, the caller said he had meant to call a different number. Sensing my chance, I went for it. "Can I tell you about an amazing deal on a house?" He said sure, why not, since he was actually a real estate investor and open to amazing deals.

I wasn't merely giving him a line, there was an amazing deal out there, and I told him about a house I had just held open a few days before. It was a rambler style with a walkout basement but the kicker was there were no stairs inside the house, so to get to the basement, you had to go outside and walk around back to the slider door - awesome in a Michigan winter. "Interesting," he said.

But wait, it gets better. The asking price was $100,000 for the house and garage on 2 acres but the garage was on a separate parcel and the seller was willing to sell them separately for $50k each. An hour later I was showing the property to the wrong number caller who ended up buying the house only (not the side parcel with the garage), put a staircase in the living room, and lived there for several years before selling for more than twice the purchase price. Sometimes you just got to go for it!