OK, maybe "hate" is too strong a word, but I'm definitely starting to hate the whole selling process. I've blogged on and off again for more than a year about my wife and I trying to sell our house. So far, it's gone nowhere.
It's been more than a month since our last showing, and we had one today, with the usual results. We had a strong, steady stream of showings through the month of June, but they dropped off in July and August. I honestly can't blame my Realtor one bit. She has been working her butt off, in fact, a significant portion of her brokerage has been working on trying to sell our house, but so far, nothing. If you're looking for the best Realtor in south Jersey, please, let me know and I'll put you in touch with her.
The worst part of showings is how hard it is to keep the house in condition to show, especially while we're living in it. That's by far the hardest part of the entire process. Sometimes we only get an hour's notice for a showing, and we have to scramble. Even when we can keep up with the house, it can still take us two hours of butt-busting labor to get the house ready. The kids can undo seven hours worth of cleaning over lunch.
Then, after working for hours to get the house ready for somebody to see it, they walk through in less than five minutes. By the time my Realtor beats some feedback out of the potential buyer's agent, normally it's something really stupid like "The bedrooms are two small." Seriously, what do you need a bedroom for anyway? I've been married seven and a half years and have two kids. The bedroom is a place to sleep; that's about it. I envy people who apparently need more than that.
It's very hard not to take it personally to spend between two and seven hours getting the house ready for a showing to hear "The bedrooms are two small." Seriously, our MLS sheet specifies all of the room sizes! Stop wasting my freaking time! Maybe I should tell my Realtor to ask all buyer's agents to make sure that their buyers LOOK AT THE ROOM DIMENSIONS PRIOR TO AKING TO SEE THE HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AARRRRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you can't live with a 10x12' bedroom, then don't make me clean! I don't care if it's a proverbial "Buyer's Market," this is getting on my nerves.
I had one incident that really set me off. One person came to see the house, then made an offer. However, during negotiations, this person disappeared. Then, about a week later, reappeared. We thought we negotiated to an acceptable offer, but before a contract could be signed, the person disappeared again. Then we had another showing. This showing turned out to be a family member of the first person. This family apparently wanted the house. However, once again, we went through the offer process, agreed to an offer, the contract was written up, and this family member disappeared. In the meantime, while this family member was supposedly negotiating a contract with us, we had another showing. That showing turned out to be the Realtor of the first person who almost went to contract, but the Realtor didn't leave a card, so my Realtor found out who came through by checking the logbook. When my Realtor went to investigate, it turned out that the first person came through to show the house to another family member WHILE YET ANOTHER FAMILY MEMBER WAS SUPPOSED TO BE GOING TO CONTRACT! I'm not really concerned with the ethics of the situation, but we're talking about more than seven hours of total cleaning for this family to jerk us around. Then, the first person came back to the table supposedly to go to contract, but once again, before the contract could be signed, pulled out. That really, really, pissed me off, and I asked my Realtor if we could send them a bill for all of the time we had to spend getting the house ready and standing around outside down the street for THREE SHOWINGS only to get jerked around three times and left with nothing.
We had one more bite after an open house, but all I've heard back from my Realtor on this (and she normally fills me in on a lot of detail) is that this bite was from people who did not have the credit to buy the house at all.
When you count in the adventures that we had with BuyOwner and the two months that we were listed with a Realtor who apparently had no interest in working, my current Realtor says that she's never seen a selling situation go like this. We're talking about writing a book when this situation is all over.
Back to the grind...
1 comment:
I've heard it's tough in a lot of places. There are some markets that are doing well, but this isn't one of them. A good part of it is our fault with our last refinance. I completely understand now why it helps to have a hefty down payment when buying a house; that way you have equity if you need to turn around. We tried to sell two years after a refinance that used up a lot of equity, and we're paying for it now. We just don't have the flexibility to bring our price down any further. We were motivated by wanting to help family. It's a long story. We're starting to realize we'd be best staying put. We have the best Realtor available, and if she can't get the house sold, it's definitely the price or the market.
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