Presenting a home at its best and staging it for sale is so integral to real estate transactions that there are full-time jobs dedicated to the purpose, and the condition of a home in a real estate market as hot as Toronto's could mean a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars on a bid.
Unfortunately for one RE/MAX Hallmark sales representative (and former National Post journalist), the prospective buyers he was taking on a Saturday morning showing near Danforth and Mortimer this past weekend were not at all impressed with the staging of the semi-detached East York home they'd enthusiastically had their eye on — and for good reason, too.
"I opened the door and yelled in 'hello,' and the next thing I see is a young lady jumping up from in the living room and running upstairs. And then another one," Desmond Brown tells blogTO of what happened after he found the back door of the property surprisingly unlocked around 10 a.m.
"I guess they went up to alert the rest of the young people in the house, because everybody started running down."
The "everybody" here was a group of around a dozen teenagers who had apparently taken the liberty to break inside the vacant but furnished home, throw some kind of party and stay the night.
They even cooked themselves a full meal of burgers and fries in the kitchen and imbibed with some Crown Royal based on the evidence left behind, which is all now part of a police investigation into the incident.
Brown, who had the mind to start filming as the youths made their escape (some of them lingering about and collecting their belongings far too cavalierly for comfort), says the bunch gained entry through a window before breaking furniture, making a mess and otherwise completely trashing the place, for which he is not the listing agent.
A Toronto real estate agent walked in on a group of teens who broke into a house he was showing and threw a party - 📹 @desinthe6ix #Toronto #TorontoRealEstate #RealEstate pic.twitter.com/jEQFFloQpd
— blogTO (@blogTO) October 27, 2021
"Excuse me, who lives here?" the agent and realty podcaster can be heard repeatedly asking in the footage as the teens grab their things and scatter, most of them funnelling out of the front door and running down the street.
"Do you live here? What are you guys doing in here? Squatting? Did you break into the house?" he presses the remaining partiers, who very slowly make their way around and off the property, claiming "it was open," but avoiding answering any other questions.
"What really gets me is that they seemed pissed off that I broke up their party... to me, it felt like I was inconveniencing them. They just felt they were entitled to be there," Brown says.
"It was appalling."
He adds that he hopes the video evidence, which has now been widely shared across social media, will lead to at least some sort of punitive action — if not by authorities, then by parents or others who may see someone they know in the clip.
"I just hope parents can be a little bit more aware of what their children are doing and put the reins on them. There are so many incidents like this of mob mentality by teenagers," says the father of three.
"But I'm sure that some of the parents, if they do recognize their children in this video, will probably make excuses for them."
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