In February, we officially started trying to sell our house. We decided to try selling by owner at first, since our area of town has lots of turnover with all the UF residents and grad students.
We had several showings in Feb-March (maybe 10?), which was always great, although a little nerve-wracking. Since we are selling by owner, I'm the one who shows people through the house myself. It's always interesting to look at our house through someone else's eyes. You notice all the imperfections that you don't normally see on a day-to-day basis. You know, just little things that you don't notice and that don't really matter, but with a picky home buyer you just never know. Don't get me wrong - our house is very nice, and we love it. But it's not perfect!
Anyway, we had a hope that we could perhaps sell it to an investor, who would rent it out some incoming residents or something like that. We figured that an investor wouldn't care about all those small issues - they are just looking for a nice house for someone ELSE to live in! They would care about our new roof (only 3 weeks old), 4-year-old HVAC unit, and low-maintenance yard.
We got an offer from an investor in mid-March, but it wasn't quite what we were looking for so we passed on it. To be honest, I was really kicking myself for a few weeks. I dreaded every showing after that, and I couldn't help thinking "I could be done right now! This could be over with!" It was hard. Garrett works a lot, so everything naturally falls to me and it wears down after a while. One day, I spent six hours doing yard work by myself, including raking up 9 bags of leaves and then spreading out 11 bags worth of mulch around the house, just to have the new mulch covered in leaves a few days later, when we got a new roof and they blew out our gutters full of leaves (I had planned to clean out the gutters one morning later that week, after laying a tarp down under the ladder to protect the fresh mulch!). Anyway, it was tiring. I was ready to be done.
It was always our plan to list with an agency if April came along and we didn't have any offers yet. So, last Monday, we finally signed with a Realtor - a great guy who was our buyers agent 4 years ago when we bought this house, and who we had been keeping in touch with. In fact, he had kinda been giving us some guidance as we attempted to sell by owner, and he had brought over many potential buyers to see the house (we were willing to pay 3% commission to a buyers' agent). When we met with him to sign all the papers to list the house, he said, "Now, I have to be straight with you - I will be shocked if I don't have an offer for you in the next couple of hours." It turns out, one of the first investors he had brought over was in the process of drawing up an offer for our house! So, he (our Realtor) had already included a clause in our listing paperwork that if this person bought our house, we would still only owe the original 3% buyers' agent commission (rather than 4-6% if anyone else bought it).
Two hours later, we got an offer. We looked it over that night, and the next day I texted back and forth for a few hours with the Realtor, countering back and forth. Finally we agreed upon the price and signed the contract! It's actually a pretty good deal - since we are saving around $5k by not paying that second 3% commission, we essentially settled on an offer that was only $2k under our asking price. And my favorite part - it's an AS IS deal, meaning the buyer cannot ask us to make any repairs after the inspection (we expect that they will not find much wrong anyway, but it's still nice that we won't spend the next several weeks making small repairs and fixes).
SO! We are under contract. A big weight lifted off our shoulders, for sure. Now we can focus on enjoying our last few months in Florida, packing up our house, and figuring out how the heck to move all our stuff to Wisconsin (UHaul? Budget truck? ABF U-pack? Zippy Shell? Garrett and I can't agree, haha).
And side note, let me just toot my own horn and say I'm getting pretty good at negotiating. Don't get me wrong - I HATE doing it. It makes me SO nervous and SO uncomfortable. But Garrett will NOT do it (nor does he have time to), so that leaves it all up to me. I negotiated the price for our rental house in Wisconsin, I negotiated the price on our minivan that we bought (more on that later!), I negotiated a price for our new roof, and I negotiated for selling our house -- with a knot in my stomach every time, haha. Just thinking about all that stresses me out, I'm so glad it's all behind me. But I should probably call some moving truck companies before I chicken out too much...
1 comment:
Hurray!! Good job!
Post a Comment