Brandon Nelson
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The Perfect Time to Not List Your Home, part I
I got a call this afternoon from my friend and fellow Realtor Joanne, from the mountain town of Winthrop. She asked if I could help out her friends here in Bellingham by listing their house for sale.
It’s common practice in the real estate industry to refer out-of-your-market-area clients to good, in-area-market Realtors who can get the job done. (I always laugh when I see a listing hit the market in Bellingham with a Seattle-area listing agent. Give me a break!)
I enthusiastically agreed to help Sherri’s friends and set up a phone meeting with them for mid-afternoon. (When we do get their house sold, I’ll send Sherri a nice referral fee… AND I’ll try to send her some business in the future!)
When I got on the phone with the sellers, John and Jane, I started getting the details of their situation. I learned:
1) The house — a 1970’s split entry in the Geneva neighborhood — wasn’t their primary residence, but a rental house — and was currently tenant-occupied.
2) They’d made quite a few improvements to the home throughout their ownership, but the tenants had “un-done a lot of the nice-ness” and it sounded like the wear-and-tear would be at a high level. Translation: A fair bit of work before it’d be ideally ready for the market.
3) The tenant’s lease was up in late October.
4) John and Jane wanted, like most sellers, to get top dollar for the home.
5) John and Jane didn’t NEED to sell anytime soon — perhaps not for a year.
Before their phone call, I’d looked at the immediate neighborhood and the competition — a whole ONE other home for sale. That’s good in a low-inventory sense, but the ONE other for sale would be direct competition in terms of house size, lot size, general condition (if John and Jane did some cleaning and fix-up), and price. The ONE other is priced at $325K, and has been on and off the market for over a year now.
My advice to John and Jane, after hearing their situation, was that this is NOT the time for them to list. Tenants make showings EXTREMELY difficult, and tough showing make for a tough sale. They readily admitted that the house needs work, and that it wasn’t going to happen while the tenants are still there. That work is mandatory if they’re going to get a good price for the house, so add that to the list against listing right now.
Also, when the tenants’ lease is up, and we factor say one month for cleaning and fix-up, we’re into November, maybe December — the time of year with the least sales volume, period. The ground might be soaking wet in a Bellingham mid-winter, but buyer activity is dry as a bone.
Finally, if we listed it that late, the 1st time home buyer’s tax credit we’re currently seeing offered will be expired. Remember, a deal has to CLOSE by November 30th to qualify.
But there’s a CHANCE there’ll be a new incentive — perhaps even offered to EVERY buyer (these are just rumors at this point)… but since we KNOW we won’t qualify for the current one, it doesn’t hurt to wait for the next (potential) one.
