Last week one of my listings sold. This particular property had been listed since the fall and I was starting to despair that it would ever sell at the price it was listed. There were lots of showings at this house, and a lot of other agents had given me some fairly positive feedback for it. I will admit that the house was listed at the upper end of its price range, but my client decided that this was the price that she wanted, and ultimately I suppose she was right because she did get that price. Personally, I would have prefered to have seen it priced a little bit lower and maybe had a quicker sale, however it was my client's call.
The day after the house disappeared from the MLS listings I was contacted by two different people (one by email and one by phone) asking what had happened to the house. These were two people who I had never seen, heard of, or had any sort of communication with while the house was for sale. The one gentleman went so far as to say that he and his wife had been looking at the house for a few weeks and had their "hearts set on it". They had figured that it had been listed for so long that a price reduction was inevitable, and at that point they would have come to have a look. He seemed almost angry that someone had the nerve to buy the house before he was consulted. The other person, a lady sent me a nice email saying that she drove by the house almost every day on her way to work and that she was really hoping to get in and have a look sometime this spring because the location was perfect, the house and lot were the right size, and the pictures on the MLS looked so pretty. It would be a long time before a house that met so many of her wants and needs would be listed again.
I had to explain to them "you silly pratts, while you were sitting on the fence being too clever for your own good with your silly little games, someone with a backbone decided that they wanted the house and came and made a proper offer." that this was the nature of real estate. Sometimes when we are too finnicky and trying to squeesze the maximum advantage out of a situation because of our greed someone else will put an acceptable offer on the table while we are still dickering about weighing our options.
Normally I would have tried to turn situations like these around and offered to show them similar properties in the price range, but the problem is that there are none, and secondly the gentleman seemed genuinely hostile that I thought it best that I let him go elsewhere. Besides, I really don't like working with people who dither about and can't commit to something good when they see it.
Comments(5)