About Laurel's Scotchtownhills

I've been writing recently about a townhouse I had listed in Laurel that had run into a few, er, challenges along the way.

There was the friend of the Sellers who had agreed to do some contracting work on the Sellers house to get it ready for sale. It involved tearing up the old (really old) carpet and installing a bamboo laminate. It involved some painting and dry wall work. The real challenge with this arrangement was that the friend was not a professional contractor. He had another real day job doing something completely different. This was just something he was doing as a favor to his friend.

That took about three months. Time the house could have been on the market had the Sellers shelled out some cash to a pro to just rip up the old carpet and put down some new and get a handyman in to do the painting and drywall.

By this time, the Seller was really, really, anxious to sell the house. They had moved out and away and didn't like the idea of paying two mortgages.

They agreed upon a price and we put it out there. Bam! Within days, we were getting multiple offers. Of course, some were of the "let's low ball the heck out of them just to see" type offers but one came in that was pretty nice. Then there was the inspections issues. We got past those with lowering the price and selling in "as is" condition (luckily we had a motivated buyer).

So, the whole ting took something less than 30 days from the day it was in the MLS to the day of settlement. A buyer that wanted to buy and a seller that wanted to sell.

This is the real bottom line -- the sellers had equity in their home. Yes, they had a smallish mortgage on it but they had plenty of room to sell the house. The Sellers were willing to price the home to sell. Not to grab that last $1,000 or to price it high and negotiate down or any of the other typical strategies that aren't working in today's market. The Sellers were very clear. Sell the house.

Luckily, we had a buyer with an agent that knew that at the price we had the home listed for that there would probably be multiple offers. So she made a good offer -- much better than all the others -- and it gave us the room we needed to work with the inspection issue.

In the end, the buyer (with the help of a VA loan and lots of closing help from the Seller) bought the house for ZERO money out-of-pocket, the Sellers got a nice check for the equity (minus costs) they had in their home, the Realtors got paid and everybody was smiling!

In a recent post about Counting Chickens Before They're Hatched, I mentioned that I feeling pretty good about things until the inspection came along and had a lot of stuff on there that the Seller really hadn't expected.

Of course, the Seller had all their money tied up in the house and, to make matters even more interesting, the Sellers had moved out of the area and weren't planing on coming back. So here we were with lots of little and not-so-little repair items, a Seller with no money (yet) and me facing the possibility of coordinating multiple contractors to do various things around the house. Not pretty.

Even if the Seller had money, they had already given up the max the lender would allow in closing help at the time of the offer. You see, the buyer wanted every last nickel out of the deal and really didn't have a lot of cash to complete the purchase anyway. So they put all the closing help they could get in the offer and the Seller, wanting to sell the house, agreed.

Now, with the inspection completed there was no more money to give and the Seller (or me, for that matter) didn't want to mess around calling various contractors to fix what the buyer wanted fixed.

We came up with two solutions: release the contract and give the buyer they're earnest money back or negotiate a lower sales price and proportionately lower closing costs credit and sell the house in "as is" condition -- no repairs.

I guess the buyer really wanted the house, after all. They agreed to accept the lower sales price and the house in "as is" condition with no repairs.

To my way of thinking this was a kind of win-win solution. The buyer gets a less expensive house with a smaller mortgage payment and, even though there were repair issues, the buyer evidently can deal with it. The seller gets to sell their house with out the headache of repairs. The Realtor makes out because he doesn't have to coordinate all the repairs....and might even get paid sooner rather than later.

Of course, the fat lady hasn't sung yet. We haven't gone to settlement and since the Sellers are out of town they have to get documents signed and notarized and back to the title company up here for everything to get done.

We are getting closer, though.

I guess what I've learned from this is that it isn't always the best thing to wring every last penny from the Seller right at the time of the offer. Maybe leaving some to take care of inspection issues might work. I'm sure not every Seller could or would lower their selling price.