The Potential House Sale

Last Wednesday I decided to obtain the services of a real estate agent to sell my house. I told myself that I would wait three weeks trying to sell the house through Grapevine and then if nothing panned out, go to an agent.

There was a close sell along the way…we negotiated a price and they were going to their lawyer. However, the days passed and we found out that they found out another house was selling down the street for $25K less. I can’t blame them for putting an offer on that place, but talk about bad timing on our part!

That being said, we gave it until the three week mark and brought in the real estate agent who had helped me find my first house, and helped Vero and I with our first home together.

It was pretty simple…sign some forms and they do the rest. I must admit that after three weeks of stress, it was nice to simply sign a paper saying “I’ll let someone else do this for me.”

Thursday they came into the house and took some photographs, all without the need of us being there with the use of those handy dandy key boxes on the front door. Thursday night we saw the listing go up on the real estate agents’ Web site but not on mls.ca yet. That was going to happen Friday.

Friday morning, Vero and I left around 10AM for our road trip to Hartford, CT to see a Pearl Jam concert. There will be more on that later. After a wonderful trip down there, we were literally pulling into the parking lot space of the Hilton and Mike’s cell phone rings with our agent on the other end. He says “You should leave the country more often!!!” Turns out we had received an offer and it looked good.

The next four hours were spent waiting for phone calls from our agent, receiving faxes, negotiating and finally sending off the final fax. In the end (for historical purposes when I read back on this entry), we sold the place for $254,500 which was $500 less than the asking price, and which was $5,500 less than the original price suggested by the real estate agent. This was also quite close to what the townhouse two houses down sold for as well. Granted, there was the commission to pay for, but so be it.

I must admit that part of me thought “Wow, that’s a lot of money to pay for essentially one day/one week’s hard work!” but at the same time, I suppose I should be glad that we received an offer on the first day and not wait another three weeks, considering we are moving at the end of June.

There is still a house inspection scheduled for Friday so we will clean up the house this evening as we know very well the potential new owners will be spending a good four hours in there and scrutinizing everything. Hopefully we’ll receive word that they have removed their financing and house inspection conditions and it will all be done.

Some thoughts on using Grapevine…

I’m still not sure where I stand with Grapevine. The three other houses that sold on our street since January used Grapevine and the sold sign was on the front of their house by the end of the week in two cases, and three weeks in the other case. This is what spearheaded my quest to sell on my own.

However, I encountered two unforeseen events…one being the other house two doors down from me going up for sale on the same day. The other being another house going up for sale five houses down for me and selling for $25K less (which essentially stole away a potential buyer). I would like to think that having a couple of houses for sale through realtor’s would have helped me out (I would surely go see a private sale home two houses down if I were already looking at another house through an agent), but this was not the case. We definitely saw a few people NOT come to our house during an ‘Open House’ session but they went ahead to the other one.

Vero and I have a few theories on this subject. Uncle Gary may have alluded to this in a few of his comments as well…some people may simply trust houses selling through agents more than a private sale. Perhaps there is a stigma of private sales (which are most likely propagated by agents themselves), and the fear that a private seller is hiding something. I find this strange considering that house sales fall under the same laws/regulations that real estate agents adhere to, and there are house inspectors and lawyers involved in the process so what is there to be afraid of? I’m sure there are some horror stories out there, but in general, I personally would not be afraid of buying a privately-sold home.

There was also the fact that I limited my listing to a 2% commission if an agent came through the door. I was speaking to Alex who is selling his duplex and his agent indicated that a lot of agents would simply not bother walking into a place with a 2% commission. 2.5% or nothing, bub.

In the end, I thought there may be some less than ideal things about my house that was scaring off people, but considering we got an offer within the first day of putting the house up for sale makes me question that thought.

I found out my neighbour on the West side of me is selling his place at the end of June and will be attempting Grapevine considering he is only moving into his new place in October. I will be quite interested to see how his sale goes as he will not have any competition on the street and he has time on his side.

Along the way, I had tons of emails from other agents offering to sell my house at a reduced commission, or the offer to put up my house listing on MLS for $500. I thought that was an interesting prospect. I generally look at mls.ca for a house listing and only peruse Grapevine once in awhile. I wonder if more traffic would have come my way by listing on MLS instead of Grapevine? I have a feeling that more and more people will choose this option in the future.

All in all, I can’t badmouth Grapevine, but I can only present the facts for potential sellers in the future. Through Grapevine, I got great service, signs for my front lawn, a listing on their Web site. I got less traffic than the other houses selling through a realtor, but at the same time, the house selling through a realtor didn’t get any offers in the first week either.

However, in the first day of using a real estate agent, I sold my house. But that could be just dumb luck, especially considering the other neighbours took a few weeks to get an offer.

I can’t say which one is better. You pay a hell of a lot of money/commission to use a real estate agent so if you can sell your house through a private sale, more power to you. I would say if you had time on your side, sell privately for awhile with a deadline in mind…I never regretted trying to sell privately through Grapevine. I would regretted NOT trying it.

But if you don’t have much time on your side, perhaps you should really think about the fact that you may have less traffic coming through your door. But at the same time, considering I did have a price negotiation after a few weeks and the main reason I lost them was to a house down the street, I must wonder if it was just bad luck on my part and that in another reality, I would have sold my place.

Clearly you can see that I have no clear thoughts on the matter. The only thing that counts now is that we got an offer, and hopefully the conditions are waived on Friday, otherwise it’s back to the drawing board.

So that’s that!

But isn’t it just crazy to get an offer on the first day that it goes on the market? Unreal. Ottawa is a crazy, crazy housing market.