It’s late afternoon June 30th a courier is in route to the Clackamas county recording office with 22 files, 
many of which need to be recorded that day to get the tax credit (potentially worth up to $176,000 to those tax payers) and of course, the courier gets stuck in traffic and just misses that offices closing time. Now, obviously this is getting close to being a moot point as the home buyer tax credit is about to be extended for buyers already in contract, BUT, what if it wasn’t about to be or what if Obama decides not to sign it (I know, extremely unlikely, but what if)? That’s just one courier and one county recording office; I’d be willing to bet there were a LOT of situations like this occurring on that day across the country.
As Realtors we have been busting our butts along with our lenders, our escrow people and our builders to ensure we get deals closed up in time for the credit deadline, it’s been a crazy few weeks bending over backwards to do everything possible to make it happen. When I heard about the above scenario (one of those files was my wife’s for our project at Cascadia Ridge) I was stunned to find out the recording office closed up shop at their usual time and literally turned the courier away at the door. Needless to say I wasn’t happy about it and I spent the next hour fruitlessly trying to get a hold of someone that could do something about it. Ultimately I was only able to get a message left on the cell phone and home phone of Sherry Hall; the Clackamas Country Clerk. She called back the next day, which of course was too late, and after a little phone tag I did speak to her…The conversation went a little like this:
(the following is entirely paraphrased as the call was not recorded or transcribed)
After a brief conversation where I expressed my extreme dissapointment that the recordings office didn’t adequately plan for this day Sherry went on to explain that their budget doesn’t allow for extra employee hours…Decent excuse I suppose, however this was after she mentioned the recording office had been pretty slow for quite a while…Once I put the two together and said “well, why not cut an hour or two a week for 2-3 weeks prior to this day then use those hours on this day?”; her response was “Well, you could have called a few weeks ago to ask us to stay open late”…There’s a problem with that too, the Portland Metro Association of Realtors did contact her office (by her own admittance) when the tax credit was set to expire the last time and asked her to do exactly that; I seem to remember they didn’t do it then either.
Ultimately I got no where with Sherry, I explained to her that in the business world we have to be pro-active, we have to think ahead, do whats right and go above and beyond without being asked to because it’s the right thing to do, because it makes sense, because we would look like IDIOTS if we didn’t plan for something like this to the best of our ability. She continued to fall back on “Well, you could have called a few weeks ago to ask us to stay open late” (that IS a direct quote; burned in my brain as she robotically said it numberous times in the conversation). Sherry in case you read this; we shouldn’t have to call, you should have recognized the need to be a little more accommodating this day and planned for it. You knew it was coming and you did nothing to prepare for it.
Another excuse she attempted to use was that they have title employees there in the recording office so they would have had to stay late too…I’m quite sure the title companies would have accomodated that (in fact, I know they would have). She went even further to say that person was no longer there that day; they wouldn’t be because you, the person that is suppose to be in charge of that department, didn’t plan for it.
I may have also gone off on a bit of a tirade about “the problems with government” and how this is a great example of it…May have.
After receiving nothing but political handbook robotic responses for several minutes I finally asked if it made any sense to her as a person and not a politician to lose up to $176,000 in tax credits for her constituents because it was ’5pm and that’s that’ when it could have been avoided with a tiny bit of planning. Her response:
wait for it…
wait for it…
“Well, you could have called a few weeks ago to ask us to stay open late”.
Wow…Our Government hard at work doing the peoples work! …Riiiiggghht.
How could it surprise us then to think the sign pictured in this post might just be a legit sign actually posted by a government body somewhere?
Scott McDonald, Portland Oregon Realtor
