<p>We listed our house around Labor Day and contracted with the agent through December 31st. This was our first experience with listing outside of the “selling season” although I did feel that our house was a bit overpriced. (We actually averaged the price the the three agents gave us, so it wasn’t on the high end.) The feedback we were given centered all around our lack of updated kitchen (we installed granite, but it wasn’t enough I guess) and master bath. Honestly, I agree, but there were six teardowns (or at least houses that were gutted and completed redone) on our block alone in the past 18 months, so i am quite hesitant to spend money on updates.</p>
<p>I think we’ll probably knock 50K off and switch to the agency in town that appears to corner the market. And we’ll pay the 6%.</p>
<p>That said, we did not have a single showing from Thanksgiving through December 31st. </p>
<p>I don’t think in this market (at least in Texas, anywaY) buyers will ever bid up. But I’ve heard of that happening in the northeast and California, back in the day.</p>
<p>Yea, there have been bidding wars on homes in our neighborhood, so having listings too low just meant that there was a HUGE turnout at the open houses. Most homes priced lower in our neighborhood sell shortly after the 1st open house, after bidding wars.</p>
<p>Can you get an independent appraisal? It might be worth it when your comps are that off…after all your buyers will only get a loan based on the appraisal…</p>
<p>I think you are in an area where many of the towns have the assessment and the tax appraisal on which it is based listed on line. Often it is through Vision Appraisal, which is a northeastern based firm that has done a significant number of the towns in CT, MA, and RI. They have a website that will put you into your database if your town used them. </p>
<p>I would do this to come up with an estimate of what my house might sell for:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Go back six months to a year, and make a list of all closings in your town. Depending on which town you’re in, there should be at least a couple dozen of them for 2010. Use excel if you know how. Note the sale price, address, closing date, acreage/lot size, #bedrooms and baths, and date built. Leave a column to input the town’s appraisal for tax purposes. </p></li>
<li><p>Go to the online assessor database and input the town appraisal for all closings. Add another column and calculate the sale price as a % or town appraisal. In my town, recently, those numbers are ranging around 75-90% of what the town thought they were worth three years ago. </p></li>
<li><p>Focus on the homes in the price range that you think your home is in. Also on homes that are in the same neighborhood, if there are enough of them. Take a look at the price to tax appraisal ratios of those. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>This should give you some idea of the upper and lower limits of what you could expect. </p>
<p>I would not use “listings” as comparables. Comparables means homes that someone has traded their money for…not seller’s asking prices. My impression is that it is a brutal market from a seller’s standpoint, and you will do yourself no favors if you get into a situation where you are compelled to sell.</p>
<p>Bottom line is that the sales in your town are easily available somewhere, and so is the town’s appraisal number used in their tax assessment. You can use that to get a real handle on what you might have sold for during the time period you are looking at. Do not rely on the realtors to advise you on this. They are mightily motivated by the prospect of obtaining your listing, and will highball you to get it, and then “let the market talk you down in price”.</p>
<p>Also, don’t hire your friend to do this. You’ll lose them. Hire someone you could fire at the end of your listing agreement without blinking.</p>
<p>Givings: Though houses do sell between the holidays, it’s not common. Most people unless they really really need to move will delay looking until after the new year. </p>
<p>As for your kitchen, our stager told us to take out anything even remotely ‘country’ – like our knobs with little fruit paintings and sort-of checked towels – because it makes the place look ‘dated’ and buy inexpensive but up-to-date fixtures and handles to match. Lowes/Home Depot has packs of ten knobs for about $30. Makes a big difference in bathrooms too. All your appliances should match each other. Changing out dark lampshades on pendant lights and buying a new chandelier for over the main table is another cheap, easy but remarkably effective staging trick. </p>
<p>Regardless, use max wattage bulbs esp. when showing in the wintertime. And open all the curtains as wide as they’ll go. I’ve looked at so many houses that have heavy and multi-layered drapes closing off more than 2/3rds of the light! People want space, storage, and natural light even more than they want the Holy Trinity of stainless appliances, hardwood floors and granite countertops. </p>
<p>Our house sold in 5 days in a stinking market for $35,000 over what the agent (a very good and savvy guy) wanted to price it for. I did a lot of market research and came up with a price everyone thought would put us right out of the market. You know your house and your neighborhood better than anyone. If you have the paperwork for anything you’ve done, like new windows, roof, siding, etc., hang on to it. You’ll want to prove the value of your work. </p>
<p>The good thing about selling in a down market is you’ll buy in a down market. If we’d sold our house at the top of the bubble, we would have made a half-million (!!!) dollar profit. But then we would have had to sink it all in another house. We got a nice price after 10 years and then bought a foreclosed spec house.</p>
<p>I was thinking the same thing. Comps on listed houses mean nothing. That’s what people hope to get. What people actually get can be much lower. Focus in on the ones that have sold recently. Here, houses either sell right away or they sit for more than a year. Those obviously end up getting a lot less than asking price.</p>
<p>On the comps - look at how long the homes have been on the market. It can be hard to tell because people will list and then take their houses off the market for a short period and then re-list so it makes it appear that it was recently listed. An agent that is familiar with the area will be able to tell you how long it’s actually been on the market, even it’s been recently re-listed. Homes that have been on the market for a year or more are unlikely to get anywhere near asking price. You need to ‘discount’ those asking prices.</p>
<p>When we listed the house we sold six months ago (it was on the market 18 months) we looked at listed comps. We were right in line with those currently listed. Over the course of the next year, many of those houses sold * far * below asking price. And I do mean far, which is why we ended up getting so much less for ours. When people get in a position where they have to sell, they end up taking much less than they originally hoped to get. Of course, that sends all the houses in the area into a downward spiral because buyers have access to the most recent sales prices and they’re not stupid. </p>
<p>We sold and bought a house at the top of the market and then another one 6 months ago. The difference in the way buyers are acting, the trouble agents are having coming up with a price, the heavy hand lenders are taking is like night and day. The last couple of houses we bought, we put down so much $$$ they didn’t even want an appraisal compared to our refinance a few months ago when they were unbelievably strict with everything. Nothing in this market is easy, just do as much research as you can, know how long you are willing to stay in the market and what your bottom line is. Don’t be surprised if you get a low-ball offer. Buyers are looking for ‘deals’ these days. No one expects to pay full price unless the house has been priced under the market or it has some special qualities.</p>
<p>Not to be a downer but:
Our move several years ago was a disaster.
Much of our furniture was damaged en route, ultimately without adequate compensation.
I seriously wish we’d just bought used, valueless furniture in the first place, and then sold it all before we moved. Because it’s sure valueless now.</p>
<p>I was left to oversee packing up the old house myself, and I was not up to the task. There is much still unpacked, much we could not find. The problem was made worse because the new house was much smaller than the old one, so not close to everything fit. Also the configuration of the rooms was completely different. We have tons of paintings, posters. etc, from the old house that are boxed up with no place to go. Every spare inch of storage space here is filled with stuff from the old house that does not fit that we haven’t had time to weed through.</p>
<p>We’d moved a few times before this and never had a problem. Possibly because in those prior moves the timing was such that our furniture did not get placed in storage- an extra move which several moving people said probably contributed to the poor results in this case. And also, before we were always moving to bigger houses, so it was easy to find a place for everything we brought with us. Unlike this time. And finally, by this time we’d just accumulated so much more stuff.</p>
<p>One problem we had was our old house sold too fast, and the house we were going to buy fell through, so we had to put stuff in storage, and move without knowing the layout of our future new house.</p>
<p>Just mentioning in case you can take steps now so you will not have the poor results that we did.</p>
<p>as you mention LPs, I finally set up one of our two music systems from the old house, a month ago. For the five years prior, all of this had been sitting around, scattered between our basement and part of our living room, unused. The LPs are still boxed, since the cabinets that held them before were damaged in the move. The other system, from the basement of our old house, is still sitting around, as we’ve no place here to set it up.</p>
<p>“For the five years prior, all of this has been sitting around, scattered between our basement and part of our living room, unused. The LPs are still boxed,”</p>
<p>No she wasn’t. Neither was I. But neither of us did anything about it.</p>
<p>Its place was in a huge unit that the workmen reassembled in such a way that I couldn’t figure out how to to route the wires properly as before, and I couldn’t move it to get everything connected. That’s why I wasn’t able to set it up initially. Then I basically forgot about it. If something sits someplace long enough, after a while you don’t notice it.</p>
<p>There’s so much other stuff still in boxes, unpacked, unplaced, that this was just added to the mix. The whole thing is somewhat overwhelming, frankly.</p>
<p>Finally this time we were having people over and instead of covering everything up as usual I decided to tackle the issue once and for all, and made some compromises that got it done.</p>
<p>“Finally this time we were having people over and instead of covering everything up as usual I decided to tackle the issue once and for all, and made some compromises that got it done.”</p>
<p>Nice.</p>
<p>“I seriously wish we’d just bought used, valueless furniture in the first place, and then sold it all before we moved. Because it’s sure valueless now.”</p>
<p>I am going to get rid of as much as I can…rent furniture for the sale of the house</p>
<p>…and then I won’t have to worry about breakage. And my moving costs will be lower. </p>
<p>I have been getting rid of so much crap…now my wife says maybe we can move into a smaller place. </p>
<p>So I throw away stuff…and save $100,000. ;)</p>
<p>That’s exactly what you should do, IMO.
And go through all your accumulated crap now,as hard as that is to do, because later you will still have it but it will be monumentally more difficult to deal with it.</p>
<p>This is all feasible in the context in a long-planned move. Unfortunately ours was not long-planned, there was a job which had to start at a particular date or it would be gone.</p>
<p>If our initial new house deal had gone through, we may have had time, prior to the move, to do room layouts to figure out what subset of our furniture could actually be used appropriately in the new smaller house, and where. That would have materially helped with the move-in and resulting chaos, and would have cleared up exactly what had to be gotten rid of prior to the move. But you need significant time overlap between the old house move-out date and the new house contract date to be able to do that. Which you should try to have if at all possible. And having to put furniture in storage should be strenuously avoided, you want to have everything go right from your old house directly to the new house. All that requires the new house purchase to work out just right, but you should make great effort to have it so.</p>
<p>“This is all feasible in the context in a long-planned move. Unfortunately ours was not long-planned, there was a job which had to start at a particular date or it would be gone.”</p>
<p>FYI, if you go onto Century 21 website, they actually have a computer program where you can plan furniture placement. It is pretty cool. you put the room size in, and then the furniture size, and with a click of the mouse you can pre-plan where to place the furniture.</p>
<p>It is very easy, and I don’t think you even have to register on line with them to do this.</p>
<p>I finally got rid of all my class notes and projects and what-not from college, almost 30 years ago. Might actually get rid of some of my 30-year-old textbooks next.</p>
<p>Baby steps… I have definite pack rat tendencies, but we are talking about moving after our youngest is out of high school.</p>
<p>“If our initial new house deal had gone through, we may have had time, prior to the move, to do room layouts to figure out what subset of our furniture could actually be used appropriately in the new smaller house, and where. That would have materially helped with the move-in and resulting chaos, and would have cleared up exactly what had to be gotten rid of prior to the move. But you need significant time overlap between the old house move-out date and the new house contract date to be able to do that. Which you should try to have if at all possible. And having to put furniture in storage should be strenuously avoided, you want to have everything go right from your old house directly to the new house. All that requires the new house purchase to work out just right, but you should make great effort to have it so.”</p>
<p>I don’t know if the selling the house—then buying the house timing is going to work for us either.</p>
<p>So as far as furniture goes, I am just going to get rid of everything except the dining room furniture, my bed, and my youngest daughter’s stuff.</p>
<p>I just went into the bathroom cabinets today and threw out 90% of the stuff in there. just keeping bare necessities. If I’m not sure about something, I just throw it away. Amazing how much stuff is not necessary. I don’t think I need cranberry soap.</p>
<p>A stager/contractor is coming to my house today. I tried to throw away as much as I could before he comes over. I don’t want him to be confused by all the dirt and junk, and therefore, think more work is needed than is necessary. :)</p>
<p>We moved from a big house to a really small rental to a bigger but not as big as House 1 house. Got that?</p>
<p>Putting stuff in storage worked out okay. We moved 6 hours from our first house so made a few back-n-forths with a U-Haul to bring stuff that we didn’t want to trust to the movers. It was expensive but considering the horror stories we’d heard of damage w/o compensation – including one in our own family – we didn’t want to risk our more valuable stuff even to movers who claimed to specialize in said stuff. We hired nice strong men through the U-Haul website to get the heavier pieces up and down stairs and supervised closely.</p>
<p>Moving companies do have insurance, but it is mostly to protect them from you, not your belongings from them. Their coverage is written very carefully to make all claims of mover-caused damage very hard to prove and many of them won’t take your valuation but only their own…so if their valuer says your broken 1830’s Biedermeier chair is actually a 1930’s Grand Rapids copy, that’s what you’ll be compensated for…provided you can prove they were the ones who damaged it.</p>
<p>Also, your belongings travel with other people’s (since most of us don’t own enough to fill an 18-wheeler) so if you have any insect infestation fears, get rid of your soft furnishings and buy new when you get there. I’d never put a mattress on a moving truck. </p>
<p>We really like this house but one drawback is that because it’s coastal-style we don’t have the wall space we had in our colonial style. Beach people apparently like lots of windows – more so than our Northern brethren. So I’ve got a lot of big art and no place to hang it. Well, at least we built a new closet so the framed pieces are now out of the unused downstairs bath-tub.</p>