Quote:
Originally Posted by Boomer
NJBlue, even though we plan to keep our Ohio home, I am very interested in this thread. It is so kind of you to take the time to help others by sharing your insight. I have bought and sold several houses and I find myself drawn to such discussions as this, whether I have a house on the market or not.
The thing you say about turning on every light in the place is so easy to do and so important. Even in daytime with the window coverings wide open, lights should still be turned on. It might even be worth buying an extra floor lamp or two to stick in rooms that are a little darker than others. Not only does good lighting make the house look proud of itself, there is also that psychology of light thing that happens.
I also think, like PGB said here, that HGTV has created a mentality of buyers thinking they can fling themselves around and expect perfection. That attitude coupled with the market does make things more difficult in many cases.
But I made use of that buyer expectation mentality when I sold a house in 2007. Only I used it in a kind of backwards manner.
It was not my own house. It was for family. The market had not yet totally tanked in our area, but it had begun to slow down. My plan was to try a FSBO first with the help of an attorney for the contract.
We had some work to do before the house could be put up for sale officially, even as a FSBO.
So while we were working on getting the house ready for the market, I put a sign in the yard. The sign said, "For Sale Soon." Just that and my phone number.
We just kept on working on the project at hand. Getting the house ready to put up for sale.
Something about that "For Sale --- Soon" worked wonders. The buyers came after us. Curiosity? The possibility of a deal? Whatever it was, the house sold almost immediately.
We did not have to do a bunch of major cosmetics. That would have been the next step. We adjusted the price accordingly. Inspections were done. The attorney wrote the contract and all went well. Could it have brought top dollar with more elbow grease and investment of money? Maybe. Maybe not. We saved time and we saved money and the seller was happy with the outcome.
If you are in the process of getting things ready, but you're not quite there yet, maybe Boomer's "For Sale Soon" sign could work for you, too.
Boomer
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I have a similar story and I wonder if something Donald Trump said in his most recent book on "getting rich" might be true. Last year, AFTER we purchased our home in TV (with a game plan of taking our time to relocate, maybe renting it out some for the next year or two)we decided to get a market analysis done on our home in the rural mountains of central Pa. Well, less than a week after the market analysis was done the realtor (and longtime friend) calls and says, "Someone wants to see your house". Now at this point (Dec 07) the house isn't even on the market or listed with our friend, the realtor. We say, sure, they can take a look, which they do, and a week later our friend calls and says they want to see it again.... of course ask for the listing, we do the paperwork and disclosure stuff. On Sat, Dec 23rd we sign a sales agreement... 3 weeks after the market analysis... Over the next 24 hrs I panic and realize that this is all too much too soon and too fast and my wife and I are on the phone w/ our friend , the realtor, asking if we can get out of the agreement (in Pa there is NOT a 72 hr period to wiggle out of a contract). The buyers have 10 days to have the home inspected and THEY can ask for things to be fixed or THEY can walk away from the contract. We figured our 32 year old house would have a lot of problems and this would be our way out of this contract (BTW... we got the asking price and by now you're thinking I musta been nuts but there were reasons I didn't think I could move that fast). Sure enough, the buyers spent 700 dollars for the most in depth home inspection I have ever seen, there was a 40 page report and no shortage of things they wanted fixed. The realtor called us and said, "this will make you happy, they want all these things fixed", so I instructed the realtor to call the buyer, tell them the house is, "as is" but they can certainly take there down pay't back and look for another house. Then the buyer kept trying to negotiate and I kept saying, "as is"... thinking they'd think I had an attitude and they'd walk. THE MORE I STOOD FIRM THE MORE THEY WANTED THE HOUSE! It blew my mind....they finally caved in and said, "we'll take it as is"!!!. Trump wrote about this phenomenon.... he had hunk of property in Manhatten that wasn't moving and his advisors told him to dump it... he took it off the market for a few months, then put it back on the market at a HIGHER price and sold it immediately.
In retrospect, had we succeeded in getting out of that sale we very well may have been stuck longer than we wanted because we never thought the real estate market would crash like it did and the value of the home likely would have dropped. We obviously pulled of moving much quicker than we had planned and are very grateful how things turned out. But the point of this long post is there seems to be a paradoxical component to selling things... in our case, the harder we tried to NOT sell our home to that couple, the more they wanted it.