This is Gonna Hurt

Leonard Cohen’s songs are full of arrow-in-your-heart lyrics that’ll stop me dead in my tracks.

Like: "Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in." 

Or: “You got me singing / Like a prisoner in a jail / You got me singing / Like my pardon's in the mail."

Or: “Dance me to the children who are asking to be born / Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn / Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn…”

There’s no end to these pithy gems. Search for his most famous lyrics on the internet and you’ll find a treasure trove of poetry, along with lively debate about which lines are the very best.

My personal favorite, from Blue Alert, is “Any way you turn is gonna hurt.” It’s a song about a romantic, erotic entanglement. But isn’t it just the TRUTH about so many situations in our lives? Any way you turn is gonna hurt?

It applies to home sales, particularly to escrows. Escrow, as you may know, is the period between acceptance of a purchase contract and closing, and it has a deservedly bad reputation. It’s almost always a wretched sort of purgatory – when home buyers, sellers, and their Realtor representatives, lenders, and various other professional advisors are in a limbo land where nobody has total control and where all manner of things can go wrong.

You think, “Ah, at last, one of the biggest financial transactions of my life! There’s a scary amount of money involved but everything is going to be cut and dry and by the book and we’ll all live happily ever after.” Then – during escrow – you learn that there’s conflicting information in the city tax records about whether the property is a 2- or 3-unit building. Or you’re told at the eleventh hour that the homeowners insurance policy for the condo you’re about to buy isn’t adequate for your lender’s purposes and the only way to fix it is to get the entire homeowners association to make the effort to find and then pay for a more expensive policy. Or, two days before closing, the house next door goes up in flames and, although San Francisco’s finest saves the day and prevents the conflagration from spreading, the water they pump out to extinguish the blaze significantly damages the property you’re buying or selling. 

There is no easy fix in any of these cases, and there’s no unilateral action or concession that will make the problem go away. Any way you turn is gonna hurt. Everybody involved is going to feel pain. And the very human tendency – when we’re feeling pain – is to hide from it, run away from it, try to end it immediately, blame someone else for it, or inflict extra pain on anyone involved and/or on innocent bystanders. That’s just human nature.

An example. Me, the agent, standing in the living room of a house my buyer clients are purchasing. It’s 7 am in the morning. I’m listening to the owner berate me and the window contractor employee who is there – as a special favor – to take some measurements. The picture window must be replaced, as well as the flashing above it and some of the wall around it. Inspections didn’t reveal this problem; a big rainstorm on the day before our walk-through DID. So, now, we all have to endure the pain it’ll take to solve the problem so we can CLOSE: Buyers, buyer’s lender, seller, both agents and – in this case – the poor guy who’s making $40 an hour and had to get up at 5 am to drive into the city from Livermore because time is of the essence. 

The truth that we’re all in this together and that there’s no one person or thing to blame (besides the weather) isn’t stopping the owner of the home, however, from having a full-on hissy fit. Spewing profanity. Crying out for justice. Thrashing about. It’s hard to witness and it’s hard not to take it personally. When we walk outside, I apologize to the contractor employee for the abuse this total stranger just hurled at him. And I think to myself, why am I the one having to say she’s sorry? But that’s just how it is. 

Any way you turn is gonna hurt. Every real estate deal is going to surprise you with some pain. Just like life is going to surprise you with some pain. It’s a given. It’s a constant. You can view it as either a rom com or a drama. Me? I choose dramedy. I mean, what other choice is there, really?