Advanced Personal Finance

A few days ago, we signed a contract to sell our house.

It had been on the MLS for one day.

The selling price was greater than we listed it for.

I fully realize this story may seem unbelievable and some readers will simply say I’m lying. I am not.

Others will say I live in a special part of the country immune from the current housing fiasco. I do not.

Our Story

We bought our first house about eight years ago. It was a routine transaction in that the house wasn’t a fixer-upper, we used a conventional loan, and all the rest. We paid somewhat less than the listing price without incentives. Interestingly, we bought the house after it had been listed only two days.

Since buying the house, we’ve not done any major remodeling save the finishing of the basement to add some extra space. It’s a new-ish house (less than 15 years old) and about average for our neighborhood.

I recently decided to take a new job where I had some flexibility in where we could live. Taking a page from Free Money Finance’s book, we’ve decided to move to a lower cost of living locale. That meant we needed to sell our house. It goes without saying that this is about the absolute worse time to be selling a house. It’s the dead of winter. The market is in the toilet. The economy looks like it’s headed into recession. We’d have to be out of our minds. Yet we did it.

How We Sold In One Day

Since we bought our house, we’ve roughly doubled our money.  As a result, we weren’t looking to squeeze every last hundred dollars out of the place.  We also are not one of the many families who refuse to accept that the sales price of your house a year ago isn’t the sales price today.  Had we sold then, we likely would have been able to increase the price 10%.  But we’re not selling a year ago, we’re selling today.

I think that’s the mistake many people trying to sell houses are making, by the way.  It sucks to lose 10% on anything especially something as emotional as a house.  But wishing for something won’t make it happen.  You have to accept current market conditions.  I think the failure to do so is why there is a 10 month supply of houses on the market.

So going into this, we had two key things in mind:

1. We were selling at a bad time.  The market is down, ergo the value of our house is down.  We’re ok with that.  We have to be.
2. We’re not trying to get the absolute maximum price for the house.

With those two things in mind, we, with guidance from our realtor, priced the house at what the market would bear.  It’s that simple.  We thought like buyers and priced in such a way that the house was attractive to them.  As our realtor pointed out, what’s selling houses right now is price.  Not goofy gimmicks like throwing in a big-screen TV or trip to Paris.  Not putting the MLS listing in ALL CAPS.  Just price the house so it will sell.

Did we leave money on the table?  Possibly.  Who knows.  But who cares?  We’ve doubled our money on the place and we’re moving to a lower cost of living city.   Oh, and by the way, we’re now going to be buyers in this crappy market.

I don’t want this to be a ‘I’m so smart’ read.  I’m not so smart.  This is the first house we’ve ever sold, so maybe we left money on the table, like I said.  But you know what a good transaction looks like?  The sellers think they got a good deal and the buyers think they got a good deal.  And we think we got a good deal.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Home & Real Estate, How to. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.