Just when you think things can't get any hotter in Austin, surprise! While we are far from a bubble here, inventory is just plain hard to come by. Let me relate 3 instances of what we've been dealing with recently.
Windsor Park- A listing came up that looked to be a good deal. With the market heating up like it has been, we knew that there was no way that we could offer full price and have any hope of getting the home. As time was of the essence, I wrote up the contract in my name with an "As Assigns" in the offer. We ran the numbers and decided to offer $15,000 ABOVE asking price of $125,000. When we heard back from the seller's agent, they had rejected all the 15 offers and asked everyone to submit a best and final with a minimum criteria of $150,000, Cash (no financing), no option period, close in 15 days. Wow. No way we could do this one. The numbers just didn't come close to making sense anymore.
Eanes- A client called about a home that looked like a good fixer opportunity that had appeared on their client gateway. A client gateway is a website that we set up to deliver new listings to our clients daily as homes come on the market. The client called late Sat night, so when I called her back on Sunday, she didn't feel rushed and we didn't actually connect until Monday. We had an appointment to go see the home at 4:30 today. Just to be safe, I called the listing agent to make sure they didn't already have an offer on the home. They didn't have an offer, they had EIGHT offers. List price was $179,000, it'll probably go for $215,000
Allendale- Lynn found a cute home on a great street. We've been thinking about moving to something with a little more space and this place had it. We would have to do a ton of work to it to get it up to anywhere close to what we have now. So she went by today to look at it, called me and said I should come see it. I told her to call the listing agent to see if they had anything working and if not, we could meet there this afternoon. I ran into her a little while later at the office. "No need to go look at that house" she said. They have seven other offers! List price was $319,000.
Okay, so that relates some of the situations where we didn't get the deals. There were several others where we were successful. We also have received offers on 2 out of 5 of our listings and another one is on the way. Realistically, we could have received offers on all 5 of them, but the two lots that we have listed are firmly priced and we turned down at least 3 calls on them over the weekend.
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