Selling a historic home often involves more emotion than logic, both for the seller and the buyer.   In order to get the highest sale price possible for your historic home, we may need to go the extra mile.

Do some research into the history of the home, going back to the original owners of the home.  Bill Cherry recently suggested naming the house after the first owner.  Put everything together in a professionally written package for potential buyers.  Of course, as your real estate agent, I am happy to assist you with this project.

Resources for researching your home include these:

1.  Get a copy of your home's title report.  If your home is too old, the original owners will probably not be listed, but it is a starting point.

2.  Visit the County or City Register of Deeds.  This is a list of transactions that involved your home.

3.  Go to your friendly tax assessor and ask for the tax roll on your home. This is a list of everyone who owned your home and what the assessed value was at the time, as well as the property tax on the home.

4.  For additional resources, you might visit your local library or the historic society near your home.  If you are lucky, they may have photos of your home.

5. Once you have the original owner's name, be sure to consult historic guides for the area.  You might get lucky!

Now, time for some marketing!  I would like to suggest using new marketing methods to sell an antique property.  We put up a single-property website with those research results on it, as well as outstanding current photos of the home, any old photos of the home and any photos you found of the previous owners. 

We submit the property to all the listing websites we can, including Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com, and many others. I have recently added two new sites to my list.

The first is www.HistoricProperties.com.  Run by two women from their computers, these women only allow homes at least 50 years old to be featured on their website,  This site is very classy, professionally presented, and seems to get more publicity as well as more google juice than other sites.  You pay just $50 to have your home or listing on their site, and they do get quite a bit of traffic.

The other website is www.oldhouses.com.  It's the same basic premise as the first website -- even the pricing is the same.  This site consistently showed up on the google search pages right behind the first website. 

For specific information on selling your historic home in Bremerton or Kitsap County, call me at 360-689-6836, or email me at Marlene@RealtyStationInc.com.