Recently, my team was contacted by a seller whose listing near the University of Washington, University Village (aka U Village), Children’s Hospital and just off Sand Point Way had expired with another agent. It had been on market for several months and the owner had been convinced initially that she must buy a new place to live so that she could have her place vacant while it was for sale. Sadly, she took this advice – which really wasn’t necessary in her case as she lived alone with her cat and is extraordinarily tidy – and she was distraught because now, months later, she is stuck paying multiple mortgages. NOT a fun scenario for her, especially on an administrative type position salary.
The listing agent did what I would consider a poor job and messed up some pretty important items. For one, he completely blew off the original date scheduled for him to come and take photographs of the town home. The seller had made a distinct effort in preparing the home and she also had some nice furniture around that would have shown off the property in a better way than it ended up being portrayed over the internet. The agent ended up showing up the day she was moving out and snapped poor photos of the place, which showed moving boxes, cleaning supplies laying about and other such displays of the home in disarray. A copy of some of these photos is below… cleaning supplies on the floor of the dining room. Nice….(not)….
On top of it all, the pricing was wildly out of touch with reality. This property was built in 2001 and the price placed on it initially was about 15% higher than it should have been. This is one of the many reasons it sat on market from August till late March. It also didn’t take into account what happened with the financing market at that time. Do you remember? That’s when the s**t hit the fan at a large number of lending organizations and chaos began to reign, rightly or not, depending on what market area you were in at the time.
Outrageous pricing was not the right thing to do for a home that would require a JUMBO loan and whose marketplace had plummeted drastically in that one month period between July and August. Granted, what we noticed was that most buyers backing off here in our area weren’t doing it so much because of financing issues but out of fear of what was happening in the marketplace and the media coverage of it – both locally and nationally.
Below, I’ll show you what the town home looked like after we got our hands on it. We put it on market on April 6th, and had 3 competing offers within a week – the winning offer being an all cash, 2 week closing, just ahead of our client going on her vacation out of the country. We’re very excited for her!
You can see all of the photos here on the slideshow.
It’s amazing (and wonderful!) what a little hard work can do for a client. Thanks again to Scott from Chytil Photo for yet another great looking property, after finishing up our Concierge Services. We hope that she’ll be relaxing a lot more on this well earned vacation now that this transaction is closed as of yesterday. Congrats also to our client for her 20 year anniversary with the company she works for and the lovely bonus they gave to her that helped make this trip possible. It’s great you get to use it for the trip and not to pay the mortgage!
