ROYAL LEPAGE TEAM REALTY: Shamil Jessa

We truly appreciated working with Shamil. He's a great agent with a wonderful personality. He is very responsive and responds immediately to our concerns. We 100% recommend him

I recently sold my house with Shamil Jessa being the real estate agent of the home buyers, who also happened to be their brother. Before I moved, I forwarded all my mail to my new address, but due to COVID-19 there were some delays in some of the packages shipments and mail that still delivered to my old home address. Shamil and his brother ignored my real estate agents emails and calls regarding my packages and mail for days. Finally after a few days Shamil tells my agent that the buyers are busy and will contact me when they are free. My agent and myself did not think that picking up my packages and my mail needed a 5 days notice, as all they would have to do is just leave my stuff outside their door. After calling Shamil 8 times today trying to get a hold of him, I got fed up and sent my sister to pick up my packages by knocking on their front door. After knocking on their door for a few minutes, finally the new home owner opened the door frustrated and did not want to give her my mail and packages. After my sister telling them she was not going to leave without my packages and mail, he finally told her to go get it from the trash on the side of the house. This man had the nerve to throw out a huge package for my 3 year old in the garbage, along with my mail. He then sarcastically told my sister that she was “classy" for going through garbage to get the package. How disgusting of a person do you have to be in order to throw out people’s mail and packages - in which was clearly a huge toy for my 3 year old - with MY name on it. I am disgusted by the service and professionalism Shamil showed throughout all of this. Regardless of whether he was family or not, this is no way to deal with past home owners. Thank you Shamil for ignoring my calls.

100% the best person for the job! We have sold 2 homes and purchased 2 homes with Shamil over the past 8 years. Our recent experience with buying and selling the durning the Covid pandemic was actually enjoyable. Shamil's 1# priority was our family's health and safety. He really did go above and beyond, providing staging expertise, realist expectations, tough negotiating on our behalf and he even helped disinfect our home before after showings! He took the time to understand our needs, calm our worries and he was fantastic with our younger son. What other agent out there, would take time to ask a child what they want in a new home and play a few rounds of xbox with a 6 year old. Fantastic! He has become a close family friend and I have, and will continue recommended his expertise to anyone considering selling or buying.

The bottom line: I wouldn't hire Shamil again, much less recommend him to others. Yes, it's true, my wife thinks he's a nice guy. Yes, on his own website he's cherry-picked only favorable comments. No denying those, but I don't think they're as important as the short-comings we experienced. There's three huge faults with Shamil's work for us last fall. (1) I believe his strategy for positioning and listing our house was very badly done. It's like he had his foot hard down on the gas pedal going forwards while staring only backwards in the rear-view mirror. I believe we missed out on many $10,000's in the sale of our house. I've become even more convinced of that now that several months have passed by. (2) He completely bypassed at least one significant legal requirement. That alone leaves me to question several other of his actions. (3) Several claims he made about the contract for listing the house: I've had multiple other real estate agents later confirm that what he said just wasn't true. Either he told an outright lie (very bad) or was simply ignorant of the facts (even worse, especially for some claiming to have 15+ years experience?) I was also disappointed at the number of times Shamil responded with phrases like «I didn't know the workers needed to do xxx when they're working on xxx». Or that he didn't know work crews to hire for prep work (painting, cleaning, etc), so he ended up finding people who didn't do a proper job and it needed re-doing? Or «This is version 1.0 of my new sign» rather than version 5 or version 10? Where's the 15+ years experience he claims? When I read the other review by N. Hijazi, I wonder about his professionalism. Finally, we did sell our house, for the listed price. But the fact that the only offer presented to us for the listed price was from a fellow real estate agent (a) proves that it wasn't over-priced, and (b) leaves me with a LOT of unanswered questions. Sometimes, being a nice guy isn't enough; you want/need someone who's actually really good and competent at what they do. Maybe some day I'll go golfing with Shamil but he won't be my real estate agent again, even if my wife says he's a nice guy.