Sometimes to get what you want, you have to be willing to walk away – which is exactly what we did when offer negotiations with the seller of the house we wanted reached a stalemate.
After flat out rejecting our initial offer (which was admittedly WELL below his rather inflated asking price), it was pretty clear that talks between his agent and ours were going nowhere fast. (more…)
Ugh…home owners can be so frustrating!
Don’t get me wrong, it’s TOTALLY understandable to be emotionally attached to your house…but seriously – Pricing a home for sale is a science. You can’t just arbitrarily pick a number that you want to sell for just BECAUSE. These things have to be based in reality. Lot size, square footage, how many upgrades you’ve put in, comparable properties in the neighbourhood and their past sale prices – these are all things that you have to keep in mind when setting the right price for your home if you expect to sell.
So after expanding our search area, we’ve found an interesting property in the West Shore neighbourhood. The house itself isn’t much to look at. In fact it probably hasn’t been updated much since it was built in 1962. Now in saying that we don’t mean the cool ‘retro chic 60s’, we mean circa 1962 textured plaster walls, parquet & vinyl floors, avocado tub in the bathroom – we’re talking full on time machine the second you walk through the door. Not exactly what you might envision us looking for in our dream house.
Up and down in less than 48 hours….and here we were all geared up to endure at least a couple weeks of stress around keeping the house in immaculate ‘show ready’ condition.
When we listed the house, we thought we were a little bit on the ambitious side in terms of our asking price. After reviewing the past sales and comparable properties in our area, we had an idea of what we were hoping to sell for and naturally priced ourselves slightly above that to leave some room for negotiation. What we really didn’t imagine was that the house would go OVER asking or that things would get wrapped up so quickly and easily.
So in between all the property hunting, we’ve been busy prepping our place for sale. Now after several weeks of painting, carpeting, cleaning and de-cluttering, it’s nice to be able to say that our house is officially on the market! It’s been a long and laborious process, but we made it to the finish line. All the papers have been signed and submitted so we should hit MLS by sometime tomorrow – just in time for the weekend!