Day: April 13, 2022

The Strangest Thing You’ve Seen In Real Estate

- Roshan

The craziest thing ever was way back in 2011. At the time I had just recently joined a startup company located at the Thrissur Infopark in Koratty. Since it took 90 minutes for me to reach by bus and then an auto to the center, it started to take a toll on me, especially when we moved to the late evening shift. Just getting back home was a torture and I would usually fall asleep in the bus. We moved to a 4:30 pm to 1:30 am shift after a while but still I felt that the wait times, especially at night for a bus was a real pain in the ass.

So I started to look for a place to rent out in either Koratty, Chalakuddy or Angamaly with Angamaly being my preferred choice, near the main bus stop as there were supermarkets, restaurants, medical stores etc all within minutes. However I was finding it difficult to get the nicer places to rent out to me as I was a bachelor; even telling them that I was 35 at the time and in a supervisory position at work did not parlay the fears of the home owners. And the ones that were ok wanted to rent out a big portion of their homes, like a big living room, 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms – meant for families and on the pricier side.

And then in between some guy who had heard me & one of the other guys talking while we were having coffee & snacks near the bus stop, said that he would would show us his cousin’s place which was walking distance from the office. I thought great, it would be ideal. So we fixed the time and I said that he could come to the office at 4pm and take us to the house. So my colleague and I went there and it was just a 10 minute walk but it was a house that was dilapidated and was utter crap! There were doors that were broken, switches that had been changed since the 1970s and it kinda looked like one of the old homes where ghosts haunt all the time.

So he was a guy down on his luck and some relative of his, who lived in Singapore told him to take the keys and maintain the house and rent it out, so he could keep the money for his needs. The rent was within my budget but the house was in terrible condition. He was hoping to save money there as well and not fix it up and expected the renters to pay for fixing things like cleaning, new doors, switches, lights, fans & toilets. No one had been living in that house for over a decade! We held our laughter until we got out of there with vague promises of calling him. I later told him that it was too big for me as I was just 1 guy and I wanted something more modern.

Prompt from April Content Ideas for Your Blog and Social Channels at Marketing.Homes.Com

RIP Gilbert Gottfried

- Roshan

American stand-up comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried passed away yesterday at the age of 67. His persona as a comedian featured an exaggerated shrill voice and emphasis on crude humor. His numerous roles in film and television include voicing the parrot Iago in Disney’s Aladdin animated films and series, Digit LeBoid on PBS Kids’s long-running Cyberchase, and Kraang Subprime in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Gottfried was the voice of the Aflac Duck until 2011. He appeared in the critically panned but commercially successful Problem Child in 1990.

From 2014 until his death in 2022, Gottfried hosted a podcast, Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast, which featured discussions of classic movies and celebrity interviews, most often with veteran actors, comedians, musicians, and comedy writers. Gilbert, a documentary film on Gottfried’s life and career, was released in 2017. At age 15, Gottfried began doing amateur stand-up in New York City and, after a few years, became known around New York as “the comedian’s comedian.” In 1980, Saturday Night Live was being retooled with a new staff and new comedians; the producers noticed Gottfried and hired him as a cast member for season 6. Gottfried’s persona in SNL sketches was very different from his later characterization: he rarely (if ever) spoke in his trademark screeching, obnoxious voice and never squinted.

In the late 1990s, Gottfried met Dara Kravitz at a Grammy Awards party. They were married in 2007 and had two children together: daughter, Lily, and son, Max. Gottfried was raised in a Jewish family, but he said on his podcast that he did not have a bar mitzvah. One of his sisters was Arlene Gottfried, a New York street photographer who died in 2017Gottfried died in Manhattan from recurrent ventricular tachycardia, complicated by type II myotonic dystrophy, on April 12, 2022, at the age of 67.