Discounting a Senior for a Few Bucks

You can consider this a cautionary tale.

Or a simple tale of greed.

It starts a couple months ago, when Morland Fischer and his 80-year-old mother took a walk. He wanted to discuss something with her. It was the same kind of discussion lots of middle-aged people have these days with their aging parents.

Fischer, a 52-year-old patent and trademark attorney who lives in Orange, told his mother she needed to move from her Yorba Linda home. They discussed how she didn’t remember things as well as she used to and that the time had come to move into a group home.

We’ll take things slowly, Fischer told her. We’ll put the house up for sale. We’ll use the proceeds to buy an annuity to cover your future expenses. We’ll get you on a waiting list at the private facility.

So far, so good. Or so Fischer thought.

Within days of that conversation, a real estate broker called on Fischer’s mother to see if she were interested in selling her house. Not realizing the call was a coincidence, she thought the broker was following up on the conversation with her son.

She agreed to an exclusive eight-month listing with the firm, one of the largest in the county. The house was listed, a For Sale sign went up and a lockbox was put on the door.

A day or so later, Morland Fischer learned of the agent’s overture to his mother. He hit the proverbial ceiling.

Not only was he not ready to “get the ball rolling” on his mother’s house sale, he hadn’t yet secured his mother on the waiting list for the facility he had in mind for her. In short, she had no guaranteed place to go if the house sold.

Fischer phoned the broker and asked that the listing be released.

The owner of the real estate agency refused. So did a lawyer representing the agency.

Neither the agency owner nor lawyer returned my phone calls.

Although the realtors wouldn’t release the listing, Fischer says they agreed they wouldn’t actively market the house.

They left the lockbox on, however. And, probably due to the hot Orange County market, prospective buyers showed up right away.

Within days, Fischer’s mother received an offer that her son thought was fair. They accepted it, but not before Fischer secured his mother’s name on the waiting list.

To make the timing work, the buyer agreed to an unusually lengthy 90-day escrow period, and the agent agreed to take a lesser commission.

In a sense, then, things turned out well.

Except that the thing has stuck in Morland Fischer’s craw.

He says a real estate agent making a “cold” call on an elderly person has an ethical obligation to be certain the person knows what he or she is doing.

As for his mother, he says, “Her memory span is very, very short. And she sometimes gets confused. Their argument was that they went in and talked to her, and she seemed fine.”

Fischer thinks the agent should have asked if she had any relatives--if only to double-check things with them.

But even if they didn’t do that, Fischer says, the agent should have dropped the listing after his phone call that first weekend.

“This is not a dollars-and-cents issue,” Fischer says. “This is a right-and-wrong issue. Even though it was our intent to sell, it wasn’t our intent to sell [at that time]. Why wouldn’t they just release it? Why would they want to make a big deal out of this? Rather than being greedy, they should have said, ‘We’ll just release it.’ ”

Fischer says he’s raising the issue because the huge baby boomer generation and their elderly parents face housing issues every day.

“Who looks out for these people?” he says of the elderly who live alone. “I don’t have the answer. My mother was lucky, because I was looking out for her. How about all those people who don’t have children?”

Without hearing from the other side’s principals, let me at least guess at their rejoinder:

Fischer’s mother was the sole property owner and appeared lucid. The agent had no legal requirement to do a “background” check on her.

They might also argue that it’s insulting to the elderly to assume an 80-year-old woman can’t handle her own affairs. Perhaps even discriminatory to make inquiries to younger relatives.

And how would they know whether a relative had some ulterior motive?

That would be a reasonable rebuttal . . . up to a point.

If I’m the agent, and a son phones to raise questions about his mother’s mental acuity, I don’t play doctor.

I meet a second time with the woman--perhaps with her son--to verify that this is what she wants to do.

To me, that’s a fairly easy decision to make.

Unless, I suppose, I got blinded by the light of an easy commission.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.