From the Real Estate Diaries of Tara-Nicholle Nelson: All about dogs (a.k.a. -- How to Tell if Your Realtor is Willing to Take One for the Team) -- Part I.

I took two Single Girl clients, a couple, out to look at this darling 1920’s Craftsman bungalow in Oakland. It had been on the market forever (which, in that market, was like 20 days), but you could see that the house itself was very charming behind this nasty, overgrown, half-dead tree – which was all you could see on the MLS photo. As always, I had received the listing agent’s go-ahead to show it, and also had left a voicemail message for the owner/occupant. I should have known something was off-kilter when we got there and there was a sign on the front door saying to knock loudly before entering, and to announce yourself loudly upon entering. But I did both of those anyway and we walked in. The house had all the original details we were looking for – stained glass windows, wood floors, tiled fireplace, intricate moldings, built-in china cabinet – and an odor we really weren’t looking for. We continued through the house, though, on the scent (pun intended) of a good deal. Strangely enough, there was a sleeping bag on the living room floor, but we wrote that off as another case of different strokes for different folks. As we walked through the gorgeous dark wood pocket door leading from the formal dining room to the kitchen, something caught my eye. My head swiveled from admiring the woodwork beside me to look straight ahead, where I saw a big, big dog standing at the open back door to the kitchen. Teeth bared + low growl = all bad. I just looked at the dog, standing my ground, and swatted at the clients on either side of me to get their attention. In unison, my clients looked up and saw the dog, who instantly charged at us, barking. One client hurled her partner and I through the nearest doorway, into a bedroom off the kitchen. We slammed the door and then sat there looking at each other in total shock and awe, as the dog barked and growled insanely on the other side of the door. I was stunned silent – looking at my empty right hand, where my cell phone should have been, and picturing it sitting safe and useless in my car. One of my clients was muttering death threats to the dog under her breath as she scoured the bedroom for a makeshift weapon. The other client was having a PTSD moment, rattling off all of the times she had been bitten by various dogs in her life, and vowing that she was NOT getting bitten again today. Period. The newly-violent client cracked open the door to size up her adversary, at which time we realized that the dog, which was big, was also very old. So old, in fact, that his once-red hair was largely gray, and that he was blind. Well, we assumed he was blind because he was sending his barks and growls in the wrong direction, menacing the kitchen sink with his teeth and us with his hindparts. Just as my client found a hairbrush with which she swore she would get us out of the house, the homeowner’s son – just home from college – yanked open the door and demanded to know who we were and why we were in the house. We explained over our shoulders on our way out of there. I later mentioned the incident to the listing agent who acknowledged that he had a “client management issue” on that property. I filed that in my mental Rolodex under the “Understatement of the Year” tab.