Showing Homes in 108 Degree Heat

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Showing homes in the Phoenix area in the summer time stinks.

It’s hot in Phoenix in the summer. This summer has actually not been so bad. We had one week where it hit 114, but other than that, 105ish has been the norm. But I digress…

I was showing homes a few days ago in the heat of the afternoon. It was 108 degrees. That means that after about 15 minutes in the sun, the interior of a parked car reaches about 900 degrees. OK, it’s not 900 degrees. But it’s really hot. I put a thermometer in my car once when it was 118 outside. The thermometer pegged out at 240 degrees. Keep in mind that water boils at 212 degrees. And it probably was hotter than 240. It gets **REALLY** hot in a car in Phoenix in the summer. (Tragically, there are people–usually kids–that die every year when they are left in cars in the summer.) The summer that Phoenix hit its all-time high of 122 degrees, I cooked a roast and some potatoes inside my car (seriously! Email if you’d like the recipe. It was fabulous. You could cut it with a fork.)

But I digress, again.

So anyway, I’m showing homes to an out-of-state investor. This client, a super nice older man, was having a hard time with the heat. I rolled down the windows every time we stopped, and after a couple of houses, I just left the car running with the AC on. But he was still struggling. During the summer, I always carry a cooler in my car full of water and Gatorade. But I could not get this guy to drink anything! At one point, I honestly thought he was going to die. I actually started mentally planning our route so that we stayed as close to an emergency room as possible.

Finally, with my client gasping, wheezing, sweating and whining, I told him that either he drank some water or I was going to take him to the hospital and have them hook him up to an IV. So drink he did. Like about 8 liter bottles. I haven’t seen someone drink like that since my college roommate went on a three-day bender. Of course, he visited the facilities in every house I showed him after that. I don’t have a problem with that, most people looking at homes flush the toilet anyway. I’ve never understood that. Like a functioning toilet really means anything. But that’s OK; most people incessantly flip light switches and invariably open kitchen drawers too. It’s just something people seem to do.

The day finally winds down. We’re both hot, tired and the client is cranky as hell. All the way back to the office, he’s saying, “How can anyone live here?!? It’s SO DAMN HOT! It makes no sense!” Well, he may be right. Problem is, by the time we get back to the office, he’s convinced himself that in the next 5 years, there is going to be this mass exodus out of the desert. That Phoenix will become a ghost town. He’s so convinced that he’s decided that investing in Phoenix real estate is insane. So he gets back in his car, points it west, and heads off to California.

I can only hope he stops for water…

 

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