How Not To Sell Your House
25 October 2006This story from CNN on a couple who mangled their home sale pretty badly is a good cautionary tale for anyone who thinks they might be moving anytime in the near future. They made a series of mistakes that have turned them into one of those “motivated sellers” every buyer is looking for:
1) They overpriced the home.
2) They had a lazy / bad broker who didn’t work to sell the house - and bungled the bids when they got a few.
3) They left it empty instead of “staging” it.
4) They moved out before testing the waters with the old house, and carried two mortgages.
The end result is that they’re running against the clock - at some point they have to sell the thing to make payments on the new mortgage, because right now they’re double-paying each month. That’s a bad situation to get yourself into - but you can take heart in that from what the story sounds like, you’d pretty much have to make ALL those mistakes to get that far along. If the broker hadn’t bungled the bids, they’d have sold above market. If they’d started out lower, they probably would have sold a long time ago. And even though they moved out before getting a good idea of what the market was like, they did at least have enough money to last six months without a sale. The last two may be debatable as to how much they constitute a mistake, but I think it’s safe to say they could have set up the transaction to run a little more smoothly by either doing more research or showing it before they moved, just to see what happened. At any rate, it’s something to be careful of - if you end up in that worst case scenario, you might have to be willing to knock quite a bit off your home price just to get out.
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