There’s a realtor in our area which advertises regularly in the local alt-weeklies and magazines as “Kiki, Not Your Parents’ Realtor”, with the little sketch you see to the right there. As hackneyed as that sounds, I liked the sentiment behind it, and her ads did seem to be unlike your typical realtor’s WE SELL HOUSES! FAST! ad — but we’re only sort of half-assedly looking at houses right now, so I never got around to looking at her website.

The most recent issue of the local food zine Burnt Toast featured her ad on the back and happened to be sitting face down on the coffee table while we were looking through MLS listings, so I decided to take a look at her website, therealkiki.com (augh). Now I’m accustomed to realtors having no clue about the web, and contracting out websites to “realtors’ website providers”, and so on, so I expected it to be ugly (although I expected it to be a bit more edgy-ugly than it is).

What I didn’t expect is that she has exactly one listing, a starter-home condo in Ottawa South — about as far from the trendy neighbourhoods her ads seem to target as you can get. And it’s on conditional sale already anyhow. Presumably my parents’ realtor is the kind that has a whole bunch of listings.

But that’s not the strange part. The strange part is that after that I was flipping through the rest of that Burnt Toast when I saw another ad with the identical little cartoon drawing of Kiki — but this one was for mangosteen juice. It turns out she’s selling Xango juice, a Utah-based Amway-style pyramid scheme/MLM “opportunity” selling miracle health juice.

I think we might pass on Kiki for our realty needs. But putting a hip realty ad and a kooky MLM juice ad with the same little graphic in the same 40-page magazine was so odd. If it wasn’t for the little cartoon Kiki, I’d have never noticed the connection at all, and (one listing notwithstanding) might have even considered her as a buyer’s agent. Woops.