<p>:)…Uhhhh no firewood please…</p>
<p>Thanks…it is not over until the contingencies are waived…</p>
<p>Yes…a price has been agreed upon…</p>
<p>That is great news! It sounds like all of your hard work preparing for the sale paid off.</p>
<p>Cool!!!</p>
<p>dstark, it is time to send your realtor to do some knocking on the doors in the neighborhood where you want to live. I suspect there might be some people who <em>want</em> to sell, but are not sure about it.</p>
<p>dstark, fabulous news! Congrats!</p>
<p>great job, congrats!</p>
<p>Nice job!!!</p>
<p>Wow, dstark, that is wonderful. So quick. Congrats.</p>
<p>Thanks everybody…</p>
<p>As far as knocking on doors…my wife is a licensed broker (she doesn’t deal in residential properties…but she can be our buyer’s broker.) I am trying to convince her to at least send out letters to homeowners in the area where we want to live…</p>
<p>Maybe… she will once all the contingencies are waived…</p>
<p>woohoo, dstark! congrats!</p>
<p>You can tell that the real estate market is hot again in our area by those blind letters. I don’t think we got any in all of 2009 or the first half of 2010. We are now getting at least one a week.</p>
<p>A friend of mine just bought a place by approaching the owners of a house she was interested in. They are older and were already planning to move to a retirement community next year, so she is renting back to them in the meantime. We bought a building lot in the same neighborhood by tracking down the owner and making an offer.</p>
<p>dstark, what good news! I’m curious how close you got to your listing price (by percent)? You also mentioned that the stager had done a great job. I’d love to hear what was done, in as much detail as you can stand.</p>
<p>Dstark,
Yes that is the current plan.
Looking at making some improvements we can enjoy in the interim.</p>
<p>I like the stories of people contacting owners and being successful…</p>
<p>dmd77…</p>
<p>My realtor invited about 15 realtors to come to my house to help set the price…
9 showed up…</p>
<p>They each came up with what they thought the listing and sales price should be…</p>
<p>Then we got an average…and talked to our two realtors…and they suggested we price our house lower than the average and just slightly above the expected sales price…
My wife and I agreed…we wanted to price the house right…</p>
<p>And we are selling very close to the listing price, and the average sales price of the 9 realtors…within 2 percent…and when you look at who is going to pay for things not done…really…we got the asking price…
I think we got a good deal and I think the buyer got a good deal…I think the price is very fair…</p>
<p>As for the stager …a friend of mine recommmended her…and I liked her better than somebody else that came highly recommended…
and she is amazing…
everything she put in the house was put in the house for a reason…where everything was placed was placed for a reason…</p>
<p>She took the colors of our paint job…and tied them in throughout the house…by the use of furniture, art, objects she brought to the house…Even the magazines and books were used for their colors …She uses q-tips and cotton in jars…and stones…</p>
<p>All the bedding and towels and pillows are color coordinated…</p>
<p>The predominate colors are chocolate, white, tans, beiges, and blues…</p>
<p>Our bedroom furniture is from Crate and Barrel…the cloth headboard…chocolate colored furniture …a silvery…bluish paint color on the walls…</p>
<p>The stager placed a mirror behind a furniture piece and then placed a a large oval plate …maybe 2 ft or more in diameter…in front of the mirror so you don’t notice the mirror…This multicolored plate picked up the colors of the wall…while obscuring the fact that the mirror was there…so a person doesn’t even know that he is looking in a mirror…</p>
<p>The stager placed many mirrors in the house…but not in an obvious way…so people would see themselves in the house…</p>
<p>A lot of picky interior designers, and art majors have seen our house and were blown away…
A friend of mine visited the house 4 times…just to look at what the stager had done…and my friend is pretty good herself…</p>
<p>The stager also made us repaint two rooms and to get rid of the bright yellow walls in two of the bedrooms…There was nothing jolting about the look in my house…It was very soothing to be in my house…I am not just saying this…I was told this…</p>
<p>It took the stager about 5 days to get the house staged…</p>
<p>If you stood at one end of my hallway upstairs…and looked at the stairway at the other end…</p>
<p>You would see the carpet and walls painted almost a sand color…with the handrail at the stairway painted white and the wall behind it painted a calming blue…</p>
<p>It is like being at the beach without the waves…My wife came up with those colors…my wife did an awesome job…</p>
<p>I love looking at the colors in the hallway…</p>
<p>Your wife did an amazing job, dstark! My fingers and toes are crossed for you to have a painless and quick transaction.</p>
<p>(Speaking of trusting the wife… There is a sign on the wall behind the customer service desk at my favorite tile place that says something like this, “Attention: husbands are not allowed to choose grout color without their wives’ written permission” LOL!)</p>
<p>:)…</p>
<p>Congrats dstark! Such quick success (well, quick if you ignore all your time and hard work prepping the house :)) Glad it’s going to pay off.</p>
<p>excellent news, dstark! Here’s hoping for a smooth close of escrow.</p>
<p>By the way, psychologists who study negotiation have identified something called reactive devaluation. Once a deal is struck, it is quite common for the negotiators to feel like they have made a mistake or could have done better (“if the other side took my offer, it must mean it was a bad deal for me” is the logic.) It can actually be quite strong in people who invested a great deal of time and thought into you strategy. So if you are feeling a little doubt right no–“gee, I could have done better”–realize that it is so common that it has a name.</p>
<p>So we finally went on the market today, so I’m here to solicit good vibes directed to Seattle!</p>