As my recent comments about real estate indicated, Jill and I are looking for a new home. We're frustrated, partly because we're looking in a specific area, and the market has gotten increasingly expensive over the time we've looked. We saw a place we wanted to make an offer on this weekend, but the real estate agent we've been working with basically told us it wasn't worth his time for him to write up an offer for asking price because (a) we weren't offering more and (b) we need to make our offer contingent on the sale of our current place.

I'm sorry, but I just don't trust real estate agents. For one, they work for the seller, not the buyer. That is, they want to see properties go quickly and for the largest amount of money. When I'm the seller, that's great news, but as a buyer...well, as In Living Colour said, homey don't play that.

So we're trying out a new service, that I discovered through the Washington Post called eRealty. They make the multiple listing service (or MLIS), the database available to real estate agents to alert them to properties for sale, available to people on the Internet. In addition, once you identify a property, they discount their fee (1%) when you make your offer. Perhaps they will be better at following our instructions and quit trying to encourage us to do things we do not want to do.