She counted my pans before she asked what the rent was
I bought a corner lot with a 1954 house on it because I wanted the dirt. Half an acre, three streets away from a plant that keeps getting money spent on it, and my whole plan was to hold the land twenty years and let the house pay its own taxes until somebody made me an offer for the corner. I had a tenant in it at $1,050 who left last spring after four years, and I was going to paint it and re-rent it and forget about it again.
While it was empty a woman called me off the county listing. She books housing for a relocation firm that staffs turbine retrofits, and she had three engineers coming in for eleven weeks starting in August, with an option on a fourth. She asked if it was furnished. I said no. She said would you consider it, and I said what does that mean exactly, and she said can I come look Thursday.
She was in that house fifty minutes and she barely looked at anything I thought mattered. Walked past the new water heater. Did not ask about the roof. She opened the kitchen drawers and told me the cutlery count needs to be twice the head count because nobody runs a dishwasher for four forks. She opened the freezer and said it has to be empty and clean, they will buy their own food but they will not clean somebody else's ice. She stood in the back bedroom and asked where a person plugs in a laptop while sitting at a desk, and there was no answer, because there was no desk and the only outlet was behind the door. She pulled out her phone in every room and watched a number.
Then she sat on my porch step and asked who answers the phone at eleven at night when the furnace stops.
I said me. She said that's the whole thing. Everything else you can buy at a warehouse store in one afternoon.
Her number came in at $2,850 a month, all in, utilities and internet on me, cleaned every other week, invoiced to the company and paid net 30 by a procurement department I have never spoken to. I spent about $9,400 furnishing it, and I still think of that house as a land hold with a caretaker building on it. But the caretaker building is now the best-earning thing I own and it happened because a stranger counted my pans.
The fourth engineer showed up in September. She emailed me the week before and asked if I had a second desk. I did not. I do now.