Relax everyone. We didn’t sell our current house. We aren’t going anywhere. I’m talking about our first home. Lately, I’ve been a bit under the weather so we haven’t done a whole lot of home improvement work around here. I’ve been going through a lot of our old posts and noticed we never really discussed how we sold our first home. It’s worth writing about for three reasons: we sold it ourselves, we sold it in two days and we learned a ton from the process. So this post is about how we sold our home quickly and if you’re currently trying to sell your home or you’re thinking about it, I think this post may be helpful.
Before we Listed the House
For several months preceding the sale of our first house, we were looking for a new place to live. We loved our home, but in our hearts, we’re both suburb people. The house was located in the city and while it wasn’t “downtown” by any measure, it was still very much a city environment. Don’t get me wrong, the city is a blast and certainly has its advantages, but we were ready for a change of pace. So, we spent our weekends going to open houses and checking out builders. After not finding anything we loved, we had talked about just selling the place and maybe renting until we found something we loved, but that never really materialized. That changed one Saturday when we walked into the model home for our current home. Something clicked and we were suddenly very motivated. After giving it some serious thought for a few days, we signed a contract to build our current home. That decision was both incredibly exciting and nerve wracking at the same time. What if we couldn’t sell our home? Back in 2010, when this was taking place, the real estate market in our area wasn’t exactly roaring.
Properly motivated, we set out to finish all the home projects that were still hanging out. There’s a popular saying that you’re not finished working on your home until the day you move out. That was certainly true in our case. Thankfully, those last projects were mostly minor and we were able to wrap them up before our first showing.
Listing it Ourselves
We made the decision to list the home ourselves and went with Owners.com. Why sell it ourselves? For one, we weren’t thrilled with the idea of giving a seller’s agent 3% of the sale price. We also thought we could handle the showings and interacting with perspective buyers. Since we still lived in the home and didn’t have any kids, we could be pretty flexible with our showing schedule. Honestly though, the biggest reason was saving some dough.
The most important thing to selling a home yourself, in our opinion, is getting the listing on the MLS (multiple listing service). The MLS is what realtors look at for their buyers and it’s the database that Realtor.com, Trulia, Yahoo and other real estate listing websites get their homes. If we tried to sell the house ourselves just by using a For Sale By Owner sign or an ad on craigslist, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.
The Owners.com approach was pretty straight forward, and I expect this to be a pretty standard practice with other DIY realty sites (but verify it first obviously). You pay a one time flat fee of a few hundred dollars and not a percentage commission. These sites usually have some sort of package deal with varying price levels. Once you’ve paid, Owners.com sets you up with a local realtor that provides you the necessary paperwork to fill out. You fill out the forms and email some photos of your house and the realtor enters the listing into the MLS. That realtor’s contact information may also be listed on the MLS and Realtor.com as a point of contact, but they just pass along any interested buyers directly to you. That’s the extent of that realtor’s involvement. They don’t get any additional money from you or the buyer. They’re just a middleman in this model. Now, we did this three years ago, so some of this may have changed, but that’s how it worked in 2010. I’d like to add that if a buyer has an agent, they still get a commission. But paying one commission for 3% beats paying two for 6%.
How We Sold Our Home Quickly
At this point we had signed a contract for a new home and had just listed our house on the MLS. The listing hit the MLS on a Tuesday morning and by lunch time that same day, we had a few calls and booked a showing for that same night. The initial interest was a relief and Lisa and I were excited that people actually wanted to see it.
In a normal real estate showing, the owners of the home are usually out and the buyer’s agent accompanies their client for a walk thru. We know that because that’s how it worked when we bought that first house. We probably could have opted to do that as well, but we decided to stick around for the showing. We thought if there were any questions from buyers about the history or the remodeling, we’d be available immediately with answers.
The first couple to see it seemed to like it, but they were cool customers and didn’t show their hand. They thanked us and left. We had a second showing later that evening, but they didn’t seem very interested and openly talked about all the work they would need to do. Sometime after the second showing, the couple from the first showing called us and made an offer. We were thrilled. We played it cool though and told them we’d think about it. After a few phone calls going back and forth on the price, we accepted an offer we liked. That was Wednesday night.
Why It Sold Quickly
There are a lot of intangibles when it comes to fast home sales: Location, price point, schools, condition and age of the home, competition, on and on. It’s not easy to explain why some homes sell in a week and some homes sell after being on the market for a year or more. I can only tell you why I think our home sold quickly.
We Had an Aggressive Asking Price
After living in that house for six plus years, I knew how much money I thought it was worth, but that’s not enough. We had to look at comparable homes for sale in our area. We looked at houses that had similar number of bedrooms, bathrooms and central air. The second bathroom and central air were critical items in our area since most houses were older and even the newly remodeled ones lacked a second bathroom and not all of them included central cooling. Looking at these sample homes, it became obvious what price ranges weren’t selling. We needed to be below that threshold. More importantly, since we wanted a quick sale, we thought it was important to be clearly below what we thought we could get for it in an ideal market. That was a hard decision to make, but we hoped that we’d get some foot traffic because of it and maybe there would be multiple offers. We had real concern though that after already setting a low price we’d get low ball offer. Didn’t mean we had to take them though, so we marched on with our aggressive price.
The House was Turn Key
Even as soon as a year before we sold it, we avoided large drawn out projects that would take forever to finish. We kept adding improvements, but most of the projects we did at that point were smaller. We concentrated on paint colors that had mass appeal, simple decor that complemented the size and age of the home and avoided clutter. The goal was to not have any conversations with potential buyers that sounded like: “Well, we meant to get to that” or “All you need to do is fix..” There was literally nothing left to do.
We Took Great Photos
I wish we still had copies of the photos we used for our listing. They were great. We took photos of nearly every room from multiple angles, so there was nothing really unknown from the listing. Looking at homes online ourselves, it drove us crazy when a house had a great asking price in a sweet neighborhood, but only had a couple photos. To me, if a listing has a few photos, it means the seller is hiding something. The more pictures the better. We didn’t even have an SLR back then. Our point and shoot worked fine, but if you have a friend or relative with an SLR, that’s even better.
We were Motivated
Like I mentioned earlier, we signed a contract for a new home. We were itching to leave. If we hadn’t had that pressing need to get out, there’s a chance we may have held out for higher offers or a bidding war. The fact of the matter is, we took the first offer that came along. The offer was solid though and it had no contingencies.
So that’s how we sold our home quickly. I’d like to emphasize that home sales can be long and difficult regardless of the circumstances. Just because you’re doing everything right, doesn’t mean it will work out. This is just what worked for us.
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