Our 2016 (Part 4)

The story continues from last time...

Immediately after we took over the selling of our home, cleaned up the mess our real estate agent had made, uploaded new photos, a point by point list of the best features of our house, a link to a 3D map of our neighbourhood and a compelling marketing ad, the requests to see it boomed. There is no denying that good photos and the text to match draws attention. With a market saturated with similar homes as ours, this wasn’t only about selling our place; it was also about selling the idea of how great it would be to live there. Not only in this home but on this street and in this neighbourhood and in this part of the city.

We didn’t know what to expect when we introduced our combined efforts on the market toward the end of June. But we realized we were on the right track when we got an offer in July. Exciting! But short lived. The couple that made the offer not only went lowball, they also asked for everything and the kitchen sink to be included. Plus a whole bunch of personal guarantees on all the stuff they were demanding. We refused the guarantees and offered a fair price in return but they wouldn’t budge. So it was “buh-bye”.

It was disappointing but also encouraging. A real estate agent, someone who does this for a living, had listed our home for eight long and frustrating months, and he wasn’t able to bring in a single offer. And here you have a couple of amateurs flying by the seat of their pants getting one within a short period. And within a month for our type of home in this area is a short period. Especially in July, which is typically dead as a doornail. So we were quite proud of ourselves.

August and the first two weeks of September, another sluggish period, were as expected: slow. Those weeks came and went with little activity, and during that time we relaxed and tried to rejuvenate. I had been dealing with high levels of stress throughout all this wearying and taxing period, and now that it was quiet, I was trying to shed some of it. Regain my sanity. Just ask the most amazing man in the world how many times he took me to the bookstore (my meditative place) as a therapeutic measure.

Around mid September, we got a second offer! This one was better than the last. Unfortunately, we never reached a final agreement. The negotiations were abandoned halfway through but it was not surprising. This couple had been dragging their real estate agent to numerous houses over a very long period of time and seemed quite indecisive. I don’t know if they ever bought a house or not. Or if the agent finally got a commission for all the time he put in.

We continued to have requests for showings throughout the rest of September and October, but no other offers. November was a predictably quiet month and we expected that December would be, too, as it typically is. But it wasn’t. Instead, there was a surprisingly large spike in requests. And although the interest in our home was a very good thing, we were so burnt out and feeling so hopeless (okay, mostly me) that we expected the year would end exactly as it had started.

Did it? I’ll share the conclusion to this story tomorrow.