A Montreal Realtor Shared His Weirdest Experiences On The Job & They're Not What You'd Expect

Montreal's real estate market is a tense and complex system of interactions between people with lots of money and almost none, managed by a network of realtors running properties ranging from the cheapest studio apartment to multi-storey residential buildings worth tens of millions of dollars. Within this hive of activity are plenty of bizarre and unbelievable stories, and I was lucky enough to hear two of them straight from the mouth of one of Montreal's foremost high-value realtors, Saguy Elbaz.

Elbaz has worked in Montreal's real estate market for years, spending just over a decade at Sotheby's managing high-value properties. He says he's sold "hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate," so it's fair to say he's no stranger to the business.

Speaking to MTL Blog over the phone, Elbaz said the highest-value property he's ever sold was a residential building valued at a striking $12.5 million. Managing properties at that price point means facilitating transactions with more zeroes than I've ever seen, and it's no easy task.

"Whenever you do these multi-million-dollar transactions, they're usually quite complex and take a lot of time to manage," Elbaz explained. "First of all, find finding the type of buyer to be able to buy these types of properties is already a challenge all by itself.

"When you're buying these very complex buildings with many tenants and revenues, and all that, you know, the level of due diligence is very high in the sense that it takes about three to four months, just in conditions, where there are evaluators coming, inspectors coming, people checking the documentation, and then even then the bank does its verification before giving the loan."

Even though the commission is understandably great for transactions like these, it can take a long time for that money to actually make it to the realtor's pocket. "It's very long and very demanding."

And these verification processes are expensive for the buyer, too. "They spend tens of thousands of dollars sometimes to make sure that they're making the right purchase," Elbaz added.

Once the buyer knows their deal is a good one, the price tags can get astronomical. The highest-valued property Elbaz has ever managed was a mind-boggling $45 million portfolio — a group of many residential buildings. These transactions are more common now that the market has become increasingly buyer-friendly after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"During COVID It was really impossible to buy, even if you had the money to do so because the market was so hard." Now, buyers have the luxury of waiting to commit to a property, since there's relatively less competition for the more high-end properties, according to Elbaz.

"There's less competition, there are no multiple offers, you can actually negotiate the prices of listings these days. So yes, it is a difficult time to buy but if you have the capacity to [do so], it's a much more relaxed market."

"Relaxed" may be a relative term — the stress, long timeline and expenses related to high-value property exchanges are just part of a senior realtor's day-to-day. But sometimes things take a turn in a way that surprises even someone as seasoned as Elbaz.

Once, he shared, he was hired to sell a $2 million condo in the downtown area. The tenant had been living in this apartment for two years, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the place.

"Basically, when I visited the condo, the whole apartment was absolutely empty," Elbaz shared. "In one room, you only had a bed with one sheet and one pillow, and this is how [the tenant] lived."

The condo spanned "almost two and a half thousand square feet" and featured "beautiful views of downtown," Elbaz explained, but the tenant was living in it like somewhat of a hermit.

You may be asking yourself, "Why invest in a $2 million, presumably lovely home without actually living in it?" Elbaz asked himself a similar question, and the keyword here is "invest."

The tenant eventually told Elbaz he "wanted to keep the condo fresh so he could sell it as almost brand new," the realtor told MTL Blog.

"It's like he was camping in a small guest bedroom in this huge condo that legally, he owned, and he paid millions for," Elbaz added. "So that was really, really unusual.

Elbaz's next story takes the minimalism of his $2 million tenant and trades it for... a certain type of maximalism, so to speak.

The scene is an $800,000 Griffintown-area house. Elbaz is expecting a standard home visit, but he's beyond unprepared for the sight that greets him upon entering the property.

"When I walked in, it was a full-blown hoarder house," he said. The tenant, for their part, seems nonplussed. They invited him in with a friendly "Come in, follow me," and despite his nerves, Elbaz did.

"I was just a little bit panicky, you know, I was like, 'Oh, my God, I've never seen an actual hoarder house in person. I've only seen it on TV.'"

But this home was in a prime area of the city, just a few minutes from one of the neighbourhood's most famous bars. "Walking in there and seeing garbage everywhere, and a very narrow hallway between boxes and bicycles and all that, I couldn't even believe that that existed so close to downtown," Elbaz told MTL Blog.

The unfortunate state of the home isn't even the strangest part of this story, though. The pièce de résistance came once Elbaz was already inside the home, nervously examining the towering piles of apparent trash throughout the (not cheap!) home's hallways.

"You know how in school, you'll have those binders with transparent envelopes where you can put papers in?" Elbaz asked.

"[The tenant] had that folder," he said, which the tenant opened to reveal a collage of Elbaz's face and "all kinds of different advertising that I've done in the past," he said.

Elbaz said the man casually explained that they'd been "tracking" him as a real estate broker.

"I just literally freaked out and said, 'I'm sorry, this is too much for me,'" Elbaz said.

But did he go through with managing that property? "No," he replied. "Absolutely not."

This article's cover image was used for illustrative purposes only.