loli

he seems to be trustworthy in many ways. Anyhow, after this lesson, we certainly will be more careful when he quotes us for other things. Will also examine hard on the long list of quotations for ID again. who's the distributor for clipsal? Any nice desgin to recommend? Heard from my ID that the latest design, which is a touch switch isnt SISIR approved leh...

oh din know that cos I am new here. Yeah, choo chiang is the distributor I have contacted too. dun think the price he quoted includes installation as we are going to pay separately for the wiring and installation. guess he is really out to squeeze me...hmmm...

I am one of those who love to have Legrand switches. We think that the Mallia series would be great for our new home, so we asked our ID about the prices. He said, we cannot get it on our own as end users, as Legrand only sell to ID. The price, he quoted, for 1-gang switch was about $38. Just to be sure, I went ahead to check Legrand's website and contacted one of the distributors listed in their website. The distributor said we can buy from them! what's more, the price of a 1 gang switch of Mallia series is only $2.20! The difference is so huge! I couldn't believe it and I keep asking the distributor to make sure we are talking about the same switch, and the answer remains the same. I am not sure if my ID remembers the price wrongly or is he trying to make a tidy profit out of it. I told him what I found out, and he insisted that was the price his supplier quoted him. Not sure if he is telling the truth but we decided to give him the benefit of doubt. We also dun want to fall out with our ID because of switches, when we are relying on him to do a good ID job on our house which has yet to commence. Anyway, he said we can go ahead and procure the switches on our own. On his part, he will let us know how many 1-gang, 4 gang switches and etc he needs before we proceed with the purchase. Thus, if you want to buy the elegant Mallia switches (often featured in ID mags nowadays), contact the distributors yourself and you will save a bomb!

thinking of installing them in all bedrooms except for the living room cos my ID said it would "lower" the interior design.

i agree. There are always black sheeps in every industry. We have come across a few rare gems as well, just that we have dealt with so many crooks thru our course of buying and selling properties that we become very sceptical of them. Take our house hunting for instance, we agreed to engage the service of this Orange Tee chap who will help us to source for apartments. He really worked hard for it. He looks out for new listings, and informed us about any new apts up for sale, and arranged for the viewings week after week. As the property boomed big time during that period, the average COV sellers were asking for was at least $50k which we thought was ridiculous. While we appreciated his great service, it is a pity that we could not find any suitable apt that does not require so much COV. So we felt really pai seh when we told him that we decided to hold off the house viewing until the market cools off. Never once, did this agent ever ask for any fee for his "leg work". This makes us value him even more. Then when the property cooled off a few mths later, though we have a choice to look for apts on our own, we feel obliged to call back the agent, as we felt we should be fair to him for all the efforts he has put in for us. But sad to say, when we called his mobile no, it was no longer in use. What I am trying to say here is when we buyers or sellers do come acoss good agents,we are more than happy to pay them the commission for the hard work they put in for us. And even if the deal falls thru for some reasons, we would remember their good service and would gladly engage them again.

my goodness! the more evil things i heard about the things they do, the more i hate them! i forgot to share one more thing. when we finally managed to sell the house, and were signing the OTP with the buyer's agent and his manager, the buyer's agent's manager actually has the cheek to ask for 50% of the $1000 OPT fees should the buyer decided not to excercise the option in 2 weeks time. She said this is for their "leg work". Jeesh! I argued back that our opportunity cost is higher than their so called "leg work" as we have to stop marketing the property in the next 2 weeks. Is the agent going to compensate 50% of the selling price, by the same reasoning? In any case, their "leg work" is for the buyer, not seller, so why should we the seller compensate them? We argued back with these reasons, and insisted there is no such policy from HDB unless she can show us in black and white, then the manager realise she can't BS us like those clueless people who will just pay as they are told. She quickly let the matter go by hastily changing the topic, and move on with the OPT form. these property agents can really find all kinds of stupid reasons to screw your money. really dun understand why these property agents dun make a honest living by working hard for the money, instead of resorting to these unethical means! they must have this mentality that everyone owe them a living. So long as they lift a finger at all, they expect buyer and seller to give money to them! after this experience, we are even more determined not to engage property agents as far as possible in future.

pls beware of this trickery deployed by property agent when you are trying to sell your house on your own. here's how it goes... the moment you put up an ad in the papers to sell your house, some unscrupulous agents will call you to find out the specs, and then advertised similar ad so as to divert the queries to themselves WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE. Think they are advertising it for you free? You are dead wrong.. this is what they will do next... When they managed to get interested parties (buyers or buyer's agents), they would call you and say that they have direct buyers to view your house and arranged for the viewing. So when they come to your house, you would open the door happily like any other regular house seller, as you would have thought they are buyer's agents. Likewise, the buyers and buyer's agent were MISLED into thinking that he or she is your representing agent as nobody clarifie what their roles are. So nobody suspects anything, especially the seller, until an offer is made by the buyer/ buyer's agent. They called up the "fake seller agent" and made the offer and then this is what is going to happen next... The Fake Seller Agent would leverage on the offer, and push seller to pay commission, even though there has not been any agreement of engagement of their services at all. When you, as the seller, insisted on not paying, they would either threaten to call off the deal so as to make you scared, or just call off the deal with the buyers or buyer's agents without you knowing. This is exactly what has happened to us. We were so pissed off with this agent called "Grace" who tried to blackmail us with buyer's offer. Only when this matter happened, then we analysed the series of events and realised why there have been no offers from those buyers who came with two agents , eventhough some buyers have overtly expressed keen interests to us. The Fake Seller's Agent must have called off the deal when we told them we are not paying them a single cent at all. Since anyone is free to advertise in the papers, and we can't stop these unscrupulous agents from copying our listing and mess things up, we decided to nip the problem in the bud before the next group of buyers come to see our house. This is what we did... Before we opened the door to the viewers, we asked who are the buyers and the buyer's agent. There was another agent there who could not answer his role, and we asked who he is. He began to panick and tried to lie in front of everyone that he is OUR agent! We said this cannot be true as we did not engage anyone. Then he really panicked and start to throw in some names of his colleagues whom he claimed we have agreed to engage. We told him politely that we do not know any of these people. Realising that his scheme is exposing, he tried to shrug off our questioning, and said "why dun we view the house first and settle this later?" We said no and explained to everyone, before opening the door that we welcome buyer and buyer's agents only, as we do not have any agent representing us. We also explained why we did so as we just have a bad experience that day with an agent. We could see the shocked expression on all buyers and buyer's agents face. When in the house, they asked us to clarify if indeed the fellow was not our agent, as they said he claimed to be seller's agent when they approached him! This proves our suspicion was true. After house viewing, we passed our contact to the buyers and their agents and asked them to deal with us directly. Hence, this is my advise to all home sellers who want to market the property on their own: Weed out the imposter before you open your house to the viewers. This would save you trouble from dealing with these unscrupulous agents' threats and blackmailing.

Style Master is it!

has anyone installed Grohe's products at home? what's the feedback on its products? does it worth the steep price tag? also, is there any good dealer that offer great variety of Grohe products and is willing to give good discount ? TIA

we are looking for nice ceiling fans for our new home. can anyone suggest a good retailer where we can find great variety at a good price? any reliable brands to recommend? thanks in advance.