Well, shoot, after having evaluated a real study of the harms of Radon gas, I guess it’s a total crock of crap (at least in the context of radon mitigation systems in most homes) after all!
Here it is: http://www.physics.umaine.edu/radiation/radon.htm .
I can’t help it if you don’t believe in the US Department of the Interior, but the study really puts the notion of installing home radon mitigation systems – as a matter of course — in perspective.
At first I was really peeved about the course of events that led to the sale of our home in NH falling through. Making matters worse, our REALTOR had been pushing us to buy a radon remediation kit ASAP — for $2300+. On top of that we were not happy with the terms of the offer we’d put on a house in Portland, ME. The real issue is that we were trying to make something positive out of a series of events that up to this point had been almost completely negative.
Kim and I decided to take our vacation w/family as planned. As it turns out I got to discuss some of these issues with my parents during the early part of the vacation and this meant I ended up spending most of the vacation having a good time instead of worrying about all of these home issues.
A couple of days into our vacation we got a call from the REALTOR who was managing our purchase of the home in Portland, ME. She sounded very unhappy.
“They got a second offer on the house”, she said.
Indeed this was a problem since having another offer on the house in Portland — which we’d determined would require some negotiations for repairs in the range of $5000 — kind of killed our leverage to ask the seller to compensate us for the repairs. We decided to ask for $5000 anyhow, and see how it went.
The sellers were having none of this, and we backed out of the deal. Immediately we felt better about things. It had been a real shit deal for the house in Portland anyhow. We’re both really glad we’re done with it now.
Kim and I also talked a bit about how we should proceed with installing a radon system and our consensus was that we’d wait to install anything until we started to having showings and/or interest again. As of yesterday we hadn’t had any showings of the house for two weeks so we believe the selling season is pretty much done at this point.
As mentioned in the last entry, our house in New Hampshire went under agreement last Thursday. Don’t ask me why (specifically) I had a knot in my stomach about things, because while I was relieved that we finally got and accepted an offer on the house, I had a nagging feeling that the same buyers who’d placed the offer wouldn’t be sitting across from us at the closing table six weeks from now.
As always seems to be the case with trying to sell our home, things moved forward quickly. We had a radon kit deployed to our basement last Saturday evening and a home inspection took place this past Tuesday.
Our REALTOR called us during the home inspection last week and let us know that the home inspector had punctured one of the underground hoses for the sprinkler system when he was poking the ground to find the opening for the septic system. Wonderful. The home inspector said that he’d get someone to fix the busted hose and affixed a note to the front door of our home — claiming that the hose has both been fixed and he also left us his business card “in case we ever need anything”.
As a result of our home in New Hampshire being under agreement, with assurances from our REALTOR that completing the sale of our home was virtually a slam dunk (our REALTOR had said that if this house sale fell through he would be “seeking another line of work” — I kid you not, these are his exact words — “because failing to sell a house this easily would mean that I [he] didn’t understand the realty business at all”), we put in an offer on a house in Portland, ME. Eventually, pending the results of an inspection, the house in Portland went under agreement. I also had a meeting with a mortgage broker on Friday to finalize the details of our mortgage application so we could get a letter of commitment from a lender by mid-September.
Funny thing happened on the drive over to the offices of our mortgage broker.
Our REALTOR called — he was supposed to have called yesterday (Thursday) after completion of the “slam dunk” phase of our home sale — to let me know that inspection was all set and that everybody was moving forward. The fact that our REALTOR was calling us a day late had to be an indication that something was wrong. You see, when there is a good news or there is money to be made, our REALTOR calls us early and often. When there is bad news, family tragedy, or other forms of malaise, there are foot dragging, delays, and radio silence.
He let me know that the inspection results were in and that there were “concerns”. First of all, we had a radon problem. Second of all, we had potential structural issues. Structural issues?! But the house is only 8 years old! This cannot be! I decided to just come out and ask.
“Do you think that the house sale is going to fall through?”
Our REALTOR is not a man of a few words. After him saying multiple words that really told me nothing, he said,
“Well, it’s certainly possible that the sale will fall through, but you should propose that you will pay for a radon mitigation system to be installed. It’ll cost between $800-$2000 to remedy this problem. Also, the buyers want more time and I’m not really willing to entertain that.”
I asked him to clarify the nature of the structural issues and he explained that the cracks in the basement floor were “probably nothing” and “part of the house settling”. But wait, didn’t he just say the buyers were citing structural issues as a concern? How is it suddenly “probably nothing”? And why do the buyers need “more time” today if two days ago they had the pedal to the metal?
Kim and I decided that we would offer to pay for a radon system and conveyed this to our REALTOR. At this point, we really needed to get this deal done.
I still believed that the sale would fall through, but at least we were trying to negotiate in good faith.
At 3:30pm, the REALTOR called to confirm what I’d already suspected. We were toast. The buyers were unwilling to buy a house with radon issues, whether a mitigation system would be installed or not. Our REALTOR had just put the house back on the market. The buyer’s REALTOR liked the house enough to want to bring more people through it. (I don’t give a crap about the latter thing, by the way, but at least somebody likes the house and thinks it can be sold so I guess the more the merrier.)
Obviously, this course of events really fucked with our days. We had family coming into town for a week’s vacation up the coast in Maine, and it was going to be tough to decouple our angst about the home situation from our will to have a great and drama-free vacation. Last night we met up with family for dinner and while I’d primed my parents with information regarding the failed house sale, and discussed possible remedies to correct the issue, and other possible financial workarounds, we all decided to keep this discussion quiet during vacation week. Having a few glasses of wine over dinner didn’t hurt either.
Kim and I ended up sleeping lousy last night and this morning while drinking coffee, she read the New Yorker. I read about radon. First, I read all the details I could about acceptable radon levels, variance of radon levels by day/season/whatever, and mitigating radon problems. And my initial conclusion was:
“This all sounds like bullshit to me.”
So I decided to Google for “radon hoax” to satisfy my curiosity. I mean, really, given how pervasive radon testing is and given how the same person who is a home inspector might also own a “radon mitigation” business on the side (and thus try to sell radon mitigation services to the same seller who just flunked a radon test during their home inspection), I thought that maybe I’d find some compelling, rational ideas to fortify my newly-found notion that radon testing was a racket. I admit it; I wanted to be placated and I wanted to believe. And just this once I really wanted something to be me-first.
Make no mistake; I got my money’s worth when I Googled for “radon hoax”. But I didn’t get much more than a Beckian Discourse written by libertarians, separatists, and other ‘net kooks who argued that radon testing was an invasive tactic by the government, unsubstantiated arguments that radon science was invalid, comparisons of radon gas to the falsehood of global warming or acid rain, likening of stigma of radon (safe) to stigma of DDT (also safe), and every other conspiracy theory about radon available. In other words, reviewing “radon hoax” sentiments left us exactly where we were before; we could install a radon mitigation system that would cause the radon test to go from 7 (above threshold of 4) to 1.5 or less than 1 or we could stubbornly insist that there was no radon issue and as a result would never sell the house.
We’re waiting to get the inspection report from the buyer’s agent.
And then we’ll probably have to see what these “structural” issues entail as well.
The good news is that our house is finally under agreement, or will be officially this afternoon once we sign and FAX in all of the paperwork. Everybody has agreed to the same terms, tho, so I think things are OK for the time being. I’m going to make like there’s not the formality of a pending inspection before this house is fully considered as “under contract”. I’m going to pretend that Pinocchio is a real boy.
The back story is much stranger.
What, you didn’t think there would be a back story?
As you recall, we dropped the price of the house just prior to last weekend (on Thursday). We had a couple of showings over the weekend and our REALTOR decided to work as a “facilitator” for this family who were interested in the house but still wanted to see other homes in the area. We were totally against this facilitation, because of its potential impact on the sale of our own home. Seriously, our agent who has our best interests at heart is able to help another buyer look at other properties including ours’?! Diplomacy suggests that you call this situation a “conflict of interest”. I prefer to call it a fucked arrangement.
On the heels of these weekend showings and facilitation events came another showing Monday morning.
Since we got our REALTOR to add us to the feedback chain for the online feedback application, we’ve been able to see status for all showings, unfiltered, usually within 24 hours after any showing. Lately we’d seen a lot of “we like the house and would be interested in another showing” types of feedback but we’d not seen any feedback that was encouraging enough to have us believe that an offer was on the way.
Imagine our surprise when this feedback came in less than two hours after the showing on Monday:
“My buyers are very interested and will be submitting an offer. They will be scheduling a second showing with the parents before submitting their offer. We hope to get back in a coupld of days.
Thank you”
Like, really?!
Get out!
I ran through all the showing schedules that I had archived in my email and confirmed that these buyers were in no way related to anybody that our agent had brought through. In this sense, we felt vindicated (or, to be frank, I felt cautiously optimistic for a change), because we’d come to think of our REALTOR as a modern-day Willy Loman.
The good news, of course, was that we seemed to have two interested parties in the pipeline. The bad news? We had failed to sell the house two and a half months ago when we had two interested parties in the pipeline.
Sure enough, the same day we put in an offer on a house in Portland, there was a blitzkrieg of showings at our home in New Hampshire. We had one at 3, 6:30, and 7pm. I confirmed that the showing at 6:30pm was with the people whose agent had left the feedback above. Kim and I figured that the other interested party were the 7pm showing and that they had retained a broker.
This was all very interesting and we got an offer that we’ve accepted, so that’s great.
The interesting back story was that our REALTOR lied to us. gasp! Yes! He explained that the couple he’d been facilitating for had actually been interested in another house and that no offer would be forthcoming. This is fine, of course, about not receiving an offer from them. What we don’t get, and on top of that totally despise, is the lying, because as little as 24 hours earlier he said that our house was top on their list and he was going to try and “close them out” on Wednesday.
What he didn’t tell us was that he was going to “close them out on the sale of the house they’d really wanted”.
We lowered the price on the house last week. This was the second and final price reduction; any further price reductions will result in a loss. This price reduction, along with a reasonable offer, means that I will get my down payment back. Technically, if you consider what we’ve put into the house over time, we will have sold the property for a loss once all is said and done. At this point, all I want is my down payment back.
Making matters worse is that we’ve found a house in Portland that we really like. Don’t recall if I’d mentioned this before, but having found a house that we really like complicates matters because it serves as a constant reminder of how much our current home situation sucks and how our relocation is really complicating our (normally stable) financial situation as well.
As is seemingly always the case during the process of selling our house, we make a decision to go in a certain direction, our situation changes, and we take a few steps back — to my chagrin. A few weeks ago, my parents offered to loan us some supplemental funds to get a down payment going for the new house. This didn’t make sense at the time because this would mean we’d end up paying two mortgages. Or did it? The thing with owning one house and renting another is how much money you’re wasting on the rental. For a few hundred dollars a month more you could just hold two mortgages and build equity in the same property. I had a chat with my parents where I revisited the idea of taking a short-term loan from them: until we could sell our house in NH. That way we could start fresh in the new home, rid ourselves of the terrible apartment, and (hopefully) allow the situation in NH to work itself out since we wouldn’t be living there anymore.
Fast forward to last Friday. Our REALTOR called me in the afternoon and wondered if we’d be around on the weekend. He wanted to bring some people through, apparently some people who had interest in the NH house after the last Open House. Fine. Later on he confirmed that he would be showing the house on Saturday morning and to another couple on Sunday morning. Where did this all come from? It certainly didn’t come from the normal service who arranged for the scheduling of showings.
Kim was like “huh” as well. In fact, we both wondered how our REALTOR could show our home to prospective buyers while acting as our (seller’s) agent. We recalled that when we’d signed the contract with the REALTOR we explicitly said that the REALTOR could not be a dual agent. Kim, who just happens to be an attorney, asked him how his showing of our property to buyers worked given that he was our (seller’s) agent. He responded that we was “acting as a facilitator to the buyers”.
I’m fine with this to a point so long as he sells the house, but can he really be a facilitator to buyers if he’s contracted to us as our seller’s agent?
According to NH real estate law, it appears that the answer is ‘no’:
12:3 Real Estate Practice Act; Definitions; Facilitator; Firm. Amend RSA 331-A:2, V-a and V-b to read as follows:
V-a. “Facilitator” means an individual licensee who assists one or more parties during all or a portion of a real estate transaction without being an agent or advocate for the interests of any party to such transaction.
Again, I am not an attorney, but the above gives me pause. Can it be more clear that one party’s agent cannot assist another party “during all or a portion of a real estate transaction”? So, adding to our dismay is what’s taking place with this facilitation stuff. These “facilitation” showings just started four days ago. Our REALTOR never acted as a facilitator for a single soul until then. We want to sell our home like it’s nobody’s business, but the fact that this unusual activity (that in my mind blurs the distinction between buyer’s agents and seller’s agents and should therefore be prohibited) is going on at all is beyond troubling.
I guess we’ve both reached a point where we just want to see the house sell and while there is a lot of sketch seemingly going on behind the scenes, we’d rather see the house sell sooner rather than later.
That would certainly go a long way in making our lives happier.
Recently we were added to the CC list of all feedback that came from all the showings of our home. While this didn’t help us much with the communication/followup issue with our REALTOR, having raw feedback from the showings certainly let us know if trending was happening. That is, trending (gathered from feedback comments) when taking into consideration a house that is not selling usually means something is either wrong with the house or the price or both.
Surprisingly, of the 6-12 pieces of feedback we’ve been CC’ed on, only a couple of those had negative things to say about the home. The other 4-10 were largely positive about the house, including explicit notes by the buyers that the house was “reasonably priced” and these 4-10 didn’t state any negatives that trended outside of “we wish this house had 4 bedrooms”. Since after all we’ve had probably 18 showings, 6 open houses, and zero offers, we’ve been grasping at straws as to what’s wrong with our house or its price (on top of our eternal frustration that our REALTOR doesn’t seem to be following up with people effectively).
I’ve discussed our issues with our REALTOR at length, but I nearly jumped out of my shoes when I saw this feedback from another REALTOR come through early this past Saturday afternoon.
“Liked the openness of home. Still think its alittle high for neighborhood with size. If sellers are flexable on price let me know as that might motivate buyer. Don’t just tell me to have them make offer either as I already have. If you know where they are trying to hit for price or know they are motivated please let me know.”
I read it, and at first I almost deleted it. It kind of said that the buyers weren’t interested, didn’t it? Or did it? I re-read. Then I re-read, and finally I forwarded it on to Kim and the REALTOR along with my comments.
After three re-reads, I was convinced that the buyer’s broker was telling us: “bring the price down or name a lower price and you will get an offer from us”. About half hour after emailing Kim and our REALTOR, our REALTOR called and gave me the run down. I’m making up the prices below, so don’t get too wound up.
REALTOR: Might as well get to the point here and tell you that there is definitely interest on the part of the buyer, but with keeping one thing in mind…
Me: Oh?
REALTOR: The buyer thinks the price is too high and since this is a buyer’s market, the buyer will try and low ball you.
Me: How much?
REALTOR: For your house with a price tag of $74,900, they are going to come in with an offer of $50,000.
Me: Ouch.
REALTOR: But that’s OK. You have a number that you’re looking for, right?
Me: Yes.
REALTOR: So, we counter with that number, and if we can’t get close to it or they’re being too demanding, we walk away. I’m telling you, your house is a steal and if you negotiate too much you will lose out. I told their broker as much and that there is no other house on the market like this one at this price point.
Our house is a steal, I’m sure of it. Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, we’re just stuck with it for whatever reason. In hopes that we could finally breakthrough with a deal, Kim and I agreed that we’d tell our REALTOR to offer a 60,000, as-is, all-in offer to the buyer’s broker to see if we could bring the buyer to the table. In fact, we basically insisted to our REALTOR that we were not going to lower the price but we are going to be aggressive with this 60,000 house (that’s listed at 74,900) going forward.
This time around, I admit that I am cautiously optimistic. I have no idea how this will turn out but having our REALTOR tell people to name their price (while knowing what our optimal case is) might be the only way to turn things around. We are unwilling to take another price reduction to 60,000 because that is an invitation for someone to offer us 40,000 and we end up with 50,000. We do not want 50,000 and given the condition of the house and quality of the neighborhood, there is no reason to settle for that, no matter how lousy the economy is.
Now let’s just see if it works.
I asked myself earlier about why I’d been writing these postings about selling our house? I decided that the sole purpose was to let off some steam. While I’m happy that some of the details I’ve provided are useful to people who have been reading this blog, I’ll be honest and tell you that I started to write about our (mis)adventures of selling our home because, well, Kim and I were both sick of discussing / ranting about the problems all the time. Once I moved to Portland, Maine full-time in mid-July 2010, I was kind of resigned to the fact that we were just going to have to live with our situation and if we needed to make a change in REALTOR that would be our only course of action.
After having re-read my last couple of postings about our REALTOR, I realized that I approached the topic with a heavy hand and maybe that wasn’t completely necessary, because we have a single and simple problem with our REALTOR: communication. Unfortunately, the severe lack of communication was a killer; it lead us both to believe that our REALTOR wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be. Had he been more clear about our status and we didn’t need to chase him down to get status updates, I think we’d be in a very different place today. By place I mean “in our heads” or “in our perception of our REALTOR” not “in a new home”. Consider the following.
I asked: “Do you have any status about that couple who came through two weeks ago and were trying to get a pre-approval?”
He said: “Nothing yet, can’t get a hold of their broker. He is not calling me back.”
Fast forward to today.
Kim asked: “Do you have any status about that couple who came through two weeks ago and were trying to get a pre-approval?”
He said: “The couple who are interested in your home are from Canada and are in the process of relocation to the USA. They are having issues getting a pre-approval through a mortgage broker. When I spoke with their broker, they still have your house on the ‘short list’ of properties they are interested in, but they are now in the process of trying to find a conventional lender, so only time will tell.”
Horse changing colors, indeed. Given the latter exchange above, it’s clear that effective communication is our real problem here. Had we known the exact situation of the buyers two weeks ago, things would have been much more clear and expectations would’ve been better set given what we’ve just learned. To me, there’s a world of difference between hearing “I don’t know” versus “I know this and this situation of the buyer’s, and I am not optimistic, but you never know.”
Revisiting the role I expect a REALTOR to play, I am not interested in pretending to be the REALTOR’s boss. I am his client. As a client my expectations are to receive clear and regular feedback. I’m not quite sure why this has been such an issue with our REALTOR (we say in almost every conversation that we are unhappy with the level of feedback and he never quite addresses this issue), but it would sure be nice if we didn’t have to spend so much time massaging a limited amount of feedback into a fuller set of details later on.
The whole situation is more than a bit ridiculous.
We had strong interest in the house two weekends ago (this the third time we’ve been in this situation in recent months). We’d had a series of showings (4 in 3 days), excellent feedback after the showings, and things were finally looking up again. Or were they?
After making yet another phone call to our REALTOR the week before last, Kim was told by our REALTOR that “we have a very interested set of buyers and they’re currently working with their broker to get a pre-approval going. Don’t get your hopes up just yet but this is a good sign.” Indeed it was a good sign, but who goes looking for a house these days without a pre-approval in hand? “Whatever”, I figured, “within 2-3 days we should have a Yay or Nay from these buyers one way or another”. Their feedback about the property had been excellent and even if they’d failed to get a pre-approval, the issue would be resolved in 2-3 days, right? Wrong.
As you know we’ve had an issue with our REALTOR providing feedback to us, or worse yet disappearing for days on end without any contact. We’ve had to call and/or email him instead of the other way around. This is particularly inconvenient now that we’re no longer living in the house and are approximately 100 miles away — in spite of the fact that the house is in “show condition” at all times — with most of our possessions still in the house just like they had been before.
We heard from our REALTOR briefly last Saturday morning and he said that he had still not gotten a call back from the broker of the interested buyers and that the second set of interested buyers were disillusioned with the home buying process at this time so that they were bowing out. Fine, at least we got resolution for the second set of buyers. As for the first set of buyers, the ones seeking a pre-approval, our REALTOR claimed that they were still in-play. I had my doubts, but whatever, the process of selling this house has proven me wrong time and time again.
We didn’t hear anything further from our REALTOR on Sunday or Monday, so I dropped him some email on Monday (Kim and I decided that after my earlier and brisk demands through email to our REALTOR that we get feedback everyday — maybe a lighter touch through email would take us where we needed to go and help ease further communications along). I waited for a brief email response or phone call from our REALTOR on Monday and got nothing. I waited for the same on Tuesday and got nothing. Finally I emailed our REALTOR again and asked if he’d received the last message. A few hours later he got back to me by phone.
And then it happened.
After exchanging pleasantries, our REALTOR said that he was out of town in North Carolina … for a funeral. There had been a death in the family. I forget who it was who died but he was out of town, still answering work-related emails and calls (I guess except for ours?), and that we should not worry about the house-selling process since it was under control.
I sat at my desk listening to this all with an incredulous look on my face. At least I think I’d had an incredulous look on my face. I didn’t have a mirror at my desk to confirm. But whatever, I was certain that our REALTOR had played The Death Card. Make that twice. He had played The Death Card the last time he disappeared, like a month or so ago. I’m not suggesting that by playing The Death Card — no matter how convenient playing The Death Card would seem when you look at things in context — our REALTOR has been lying to us about family issues to shroud the fact that he’s not been able to sell the house. I just find it very odd that death has played such a prominent role in the sale of our home over the last 2.5 months. It’s entirely possible that our REALTOR is having a really rough patch and as a result his attention has been diverted. Of course, we never learn about these family tragedies until after the fact, so the end result is that we assume everything is moving along nicely until we realize that it’s exactly the opposite.
Don’t worry. It gets better. You didn’t think it wouldn’t get better, did you?
Our REALTOR continued his apology for this absence, and then switched tracks to giving me a status update about the house. Our REALTOR stated that the issue of not having sold the house to the most recent buyers is not related to his absence but is related to their broker not calling him back, followed with an explanation that the buyers are probably not interested because so much time has passed between their interest in the house and today, and finally with a proclamation that maybe we should lower the price — again — but by what number, he was not sure. And on top of that, he said that “some houses just take a long time to sell”.
What?! Price reduction? Where did this come from?!
Don’t get me wrong. I figured that after two weeks, if somebody was either financially not in a position to buy a house (or their broker is incognito or what have you), that writing is on the wall that they’re not going to buy the house. It would just be nice to get straight talk from our REALTOR about this, preferably long before these interactions drag on for a couple of weeks.
I’ve also resigned myself to the possibility that our lovely home is on the market at the wrong time, that it may in fact take another year to sell, or if we totally shit-can the price, we could possibly sell the house at a drop-dead price, in a very short time from now, just for mercy on our sanity. (And we’d incur a huge loss in the process.)
It’s also the possibility that it’s time to speak with the head REALTOR at the firm we’ve got a contract with, and maybe see if we can speak with some of our REALTOR’s other clients to get a better idea if they’re satisfied with the service they’re receiving from our REALTOR, or if we cannot speak to other clients, maybe the head REALTOR will assign us to somebody else.
In my last entry on this topic, a REALTOR from RE/MAX chimed in — in the comments section. He noted that he tries to convey to his clients how he is marketing their homes. In the sense of marketing, I think we’re doing OK, believe it or not. We’ve had about a dozen people through our Open Houses and at least a dozen showings. The issue is not adequate marketing, we feel, but followup.
If our REALTOR has problems contacting us proactively or in a timely fashion, can we trust that he’s not dropping the ball with potential sales for the same reason?
Long story short: Kim and I are moving to Portland, ME. Kim’s been there for the last year and got another job so that she’ll be there much longer, and I’d been sharing time between Cambridge, MA, Salem, NH, and Portland, ME since August 2009. As of June 2010, I got a job in ME and my first official day of living in Portland full-time will be 7/19/2010. The act of finally settling in Maine has been bumpy and uncertain — the biggest issue being the sale of our home in Salem, NH. As of this posting, the house is still on the market but has not been sold.
This blog entry pretty much chronicles a FSBO home sale vs. a REALTOR home sale.
Kim and I determined that we were going to put the house on the market in the spring of 2010. We did our own market analysis through the copious amount of websites that are dedicated to real estate and trends, and determined, to our chagrin, that our house (like probably everybody else’s in Southern New England) had shed a ton of its value. Luckily for us, we had a lot of equity in the property, so we weren’t forced to take a loss on the house, but our ability to benefit financially from our equity in the house was greatly diminished. This lead us to ask ourselves if paying another $20K to a REALTOR to sell the house would be a necessary evil since, all told, we’d have already not recognized tens of thousands of dollars due to the lousy housing market. Tacking on another $20K for a REALTOR’s commission was something that I was hoping not to have to do.
As it turns out, I knew someone who had sold two properties through FSBO. FSBO, if you’re unfamiliar, is a flat-rate listing service that gets your home into the MLS with all the other homes that have been made available by a REALTOR. Without the MLS, it’s probable that you will not have the exposure of your home to a larger number of buyers. In the end, the FSBO process is intended to be transparent to REALTORs and buyers alike since your property is listed in the MLS and the buyer’s REALTOR would “share” an X% commission with you. Unfortunately, our experience with FSBO suggests that the process is hardly transparent given our results.
This is not to suggest that we believe there is a conspiracy by REALTORs against people who sell their homes FSBO. This is to suggest that FSBO loses its transparency when you have to sell. For example, if a buyer comes to your home and likes the property but isn’t ready to sign on the dotted line, you will need to deal with the buyer’s broker (REALTOR). In this sense, the transparency of our FSBO disappeared because we had to enter a negotiation with the buyer’s broker to see what it would take for the buyer to move forward with the purchase of our home. If we’d had a REALTOR, the negotiation would’ve been conducted between our broker and the buyer’s broker.
With FSBO, you are assigned to a licensed REALTOR who is responsible for maintaining your listing in the MLS (and any changes you make to it) and is also available to answer any questions you may have. Your FSBO REALTOR will also sell you add-ons like a listing service that will schedule showings for your house. The REALTOR that is assigned to you has zero responsibility to sell your house or to act as your seller’s agent. In fact, if you want to have your listing agent act as your seller’s agent, they will charge you X% to do the job. This defeats the purpose of FSBO, of course, so we did not entertain this.
Since our house was on the market under FSBO during the last months of the $8000 tax credit for first-time home buyers, we were hoping to ride the coattails of the activity that was taking place in the housing market. Unfortunately, we had but two showings and one showing during an open house of the property during a 6-week period while listed FSBO. When a house two blocks away sold in May 2010 and we’d received none of the “action” by way of the same people coming for a showing of our house — that was technically “competing” in the same market for the house that sold –we realized that it was time to give up the FSBO track and go with a conventional REALTOR.
Kim and I decided to interview a handful of REALTORs/firms because I had bad experiences with REALTORs in the past and we decided that since (I) had screwed the pooch with listing the house FSBO in the first place, we needed to hire someone who would sell the house. We wanted to hire a salesperson, not somebody who just farted around with the listing and received a commission once the house sold; hiring a salesperson in this lousy market, we felt, was the only way that the house would sell. Certainly, most houses will sell themselves in the sense that a buyer will extend an offer — REALTOR or not. I’ve never felt that a REALTOR’s job was to polish a turd. I’ve always felt that while a REALTOR was there to portray the property in its best light, the most important role of a REALTOR was to make a sale through entering a negotiation with a buyer or a buyer’s broker. Sometimes this involves suggesting that the seller changes or fixes something in the house. Sometimes this involves sweetening the deal for the buyer. Sometimes it’s more complicated.
One of the major drawbacks of selling with a REALTOR is the contract that you sign when you “hire” a REALTOR. Basically, if we “fired” our REALTOR we’d be assigned another REALTOR from the same firm. If we “fired” the firm they could put a lien against the property where we’d owe them X% commission upon sale of the home — whether they were actually involved in the sale of our home or not. Sure, you could try to litigate it out or attempt to negotiate with the firm, but at some point you’d just be throwing more money away. Selling with a REALTOR is a necessary evil, given what we’d experienced with FSBO, but is also a practice that is totally unfair to the seller. On the flip side, buying a home is easy.
We interviewed three REALTORs. The first didn’t please us at all so we didn’t hire him. The second we liked because he came prepared with a full market analysis and had already mocked up a brochure and listing for our house. The third we liked, so it was a toss up between the second and third. We hired the second REALTOR because of his experience (and not coincidentally he was the broker who sold the house two blocks away and another one block away).
We got off to a running start with our REALTOR. He staged the house for selling (lots of stuff moved around, made rooms look bigger, insisted that we hire a landscaper who did the work following his spec, etc), got the listing going, and scheduled the first open house. Unlike the open houses we’d held under FSBO, people actually came to his open house. We didn’t have any showings at this point but he assured us up and down that things would pick up.
By late May or early June 2010, things really picked up. We had a lot of activity at the open houses and we also had a lot of showings. It appeared that we were going to sell the house — until a buyer changed their mind at the last moment.
We decided to be aggressive and dropped the price by $20K in early June 2010, a move our REALTOR swore would “move the property in a hurry”. This is the only price reduction we’ll be doing, by the way.
Shortly after that, our REALTOR basically stopping calling us. We knew he’d had a number of people in the pipeline who were, according to him, all of varying degrees of interest in the house, but he never really gave us any status about where they were, what kinds of conversations he was having, if they were still interested in the house, etc.
We had several more showings in June 2010 but we continued to get no feedback from our REALTOR. Clearly, we didn’t have any second showings from these showings. But we also had no feedback as to why we never received any offers from these showings either. I knew this was not right since I’d sold a house in 2002, tried to sell this house before in 2005, and have been through the process of buying two homes. In my experience, regular communication with your REALTOR was par for the course, in particular if there was an issue with the property (that you were selling) that needed to be addressed. The fact that we were receiving no feedback was troubling. Actually, I understated. We were furious all the way around. How could we screw the pooch twice during the course of selling the house? First, we did FSBO which was a fiasco. Now, we hired a REALTOR who seemed to be having problems with follow through?! Damn.
As it turns out, our REALTOR had a series of family issues that lead to the lack of communication. Unfortunately, while we could sympathize, we also felt that we had lost a lot of precious time — almost a month — where all of the house showings seemed to go by the wayside. Of course, you can’t just tell somebody who’s experienced a family tragedy that they’re doing a lousy job, that is, unless you’re George Costanza.
After addressing our unhappiness with the REALTOR we realized that we were not clear enough. We think he took our addressing of the situation as us asking him if he’s “bought in” to selling our home. We intended to convey that we were unhappy with his services.
Suffice it to say, I’ve become pretty disillusioned with the process of selling this house. At times, I’ve asked myself what I was thinking when I bought this “leper house” back in 2002! At others, I’ve wondered if the REALTOR is actually fine but the market isn’t making the sale a reality right now. And at even others, I’ve wondered if we’ve missed the window to sell the house this season. Only time will tell.
Being in Maine, away from the mess, starting a new job, and spending time with my wife, I assume, will bring clarity to the whole situation to the extent that I can stop living it all the time. And if things don’t improve and our contract with the current firm is “up”, we’ll just have to hire another REALTOR as I continue to have my doubts that our current guy can pull it off.
It’s interesting what you learn from your parents when you sit back — you now being late in your 30′s — and take it all in. Or, to put it another way, it’s easy to put your parents in perspective when you’re responsible for making your own decisions.
About the time I was old enough to understand the concepts of work and money, I was tasked with mowing the lawn. Our first lawnmower, a Toro, lasted from the late 1960′s through 1983. We bought a Honda in 1984 and to this day (yes, 2009!) the mower lives — and it still works! Since there was a clear difference in quality (I know this because I had been tasked with lawn care) between the Toro and the Honda, I made a mental note to buy a Honda mower someday when I was in the market for a quality mower. I bought one in 2002, adding to note that I bought it at a premium price, and was beside myself that its power drive was dead by 2008. The power drive can be replaced, but at a premium price.
Same goes for Sears. We used to almost exclusively buy Craftsman and Kenmore brands for home improvement and home management needs. We had these items for years and years. If I’m correct, my parents still have power tools from Craftsman that are more than functional, but perhaps sitting on a shelf because they have been replaced with more modern ones that function without cords, with added features, or without the explicit threat of electric shock. Still, that’s not a knock on Sears. It’s just an understanding on everybody’s part that safety and regulations have changed over the last 38 years and maybe some replacement with new technology would be in our best interest.
It’s strange that as you grow older you act as you envisioned your parents as having acted when you were a child. In my case I went with brands that were “family friends” and in this case it was Honda and Sears. In my experience, we didn’t buy that much unnecessary stuff. We bought things here and there, but when we bought things we paid top dollar because we expected them to last. And given my lifelong experience with these items, I can say that empirical evidence lead me to put faith in the previously mentioned brands such that I put thousands of dollars of my own money into purchasing these brands — as I envisioned myself being able to influence my future childrens’ buying biases in the same way. 
A funny thing happened on the way to bragging about brands 30 years from now: super-capitalism.
Bellyache all you want about government spending and the supposed ineffectiveness of services handled by government. Attend as many “free-stater” meetings as you want. Ignore history even though its most negative aspects are repeated constantly by businesses in our country. Believe FOX News if you really have nothing better to do. In the end, you are left to wonder why this country is where it stands today: “we’ve demanded too much and now we’re getting too little in return”. It’s not the government (or its relative size) that’s killing us. It’s corporate mismanagement and misbehavior.
Now let’s talk about Sears.
I spent $1000 for a snowblower in 2002. It was a “top of the line” model from Sears/Craftsman with a Tecumseh engine, 29″, 9hp. I live in NH and I’m sure we easily get 130″ of snow per season, so this model seemed to take me where I needed to go. I could see myself using it for years to come and maybe even leaving it to the next owners of our current home, that is, until it broke the first time: in 2002. Thankfully, it was under warranty, and after a couple of weeks Sears had a tech come out to repair it. It worked until 2008 — when it started to misbehave again. As of 2009, it’s in dire need of service again since it’s practically unusable. I figured “fine”, after all I didn’t expect Sears to service an out-of-warranty product for free, and called Sears for a service appointment. They were scheduled to arrive last Saturday at 9:30 for a service appointment.
I woke up at 6:30am last Saturday and waited until 9:30am. People, I am a Unix System Administrator. I wake up at odd hours for maintenance all the time — like 4am, 5am, 2am, whatever. I’ve been living this kind of lifestyle for at least a decade — in real true blue industry — and I’m totally used to it. As such, there was no way I would’ve missed a Sears tech who was scheduled to arrive at what I’d estimate as a totally reasonable time.
As of 9:45am, there was no sign of a technician.
I ranted a bit to my wife then wearily headed upstairs to shower. She called Sears back while I was in the shower and according to the escalation path she was on, she spoke to a nice woman who not only registered our complaints, but claimed that “Sears Corporate” would call my cell within 48 business hours and that it would be possible not to be charged for our service call based on a conversation with corporate.
As it turns out Sears publishes PDF service manuals for all their products online. I perused the manual and spoke to a friend who knows this stuff like it’s nobody’s business. The end result is that I probably need to buy a rubber disc for like $15, and this should cure the problem with the blower’s power drive. Great.
Fast forward to today, 96 hours later, my wife called Sears again. The “Sears Escalation Line” refused to accept her complaint or request for remedy. In fact, they claimed that they did not accept complaints at all. Seriously? You’re a business and nobody on your end is willing to be accountable for anything?! Are you people the real socialists? My wife ended up getting sent back to customer service who disavowed all knowledge of our service problem, accused my wife of hanging up on them, and further refused to give us any relief as a customer. I strongly suggested that we should let the tech come out on Saturday, claim that we were granted a gratis service visit from Sears, and that if they didn’t agree we would send them on their way. There is some disagreement about this suggestion of mine between the two of us, but on the other hand I’d hate to have to explain to Sears why we don’t owe them for a service call that never actually took place — given how “effective” our results have been with Sears customer service up until now.
Remember, Sears was a small and private business back in the day. 100% privatization always seems like a good idea: until you realize that it’s terrible in practice.
