Jan 11
10
Is Your Mom Fighting YOUR Battles For You??
by Julie Broad
On Friday we put in an offer on a solid house on a quiet street that needs a lot of cosmetic work. It needs new flooring throughout the home. The bathrooms need some work and the entire house needs painting. It’s not a massive project like our 70′s house renovation but it will still be a substantial project.
We ran the numbers and figured that when it’s all fixed up with new floors, paint and a bit of bathroom updating it would be worth about $310,000. If we invest more money on the bathrooms that number would go up a little bit. We figured that the work would cost somewhere between $10,000 – $15,000 depending on how much we do in the bathrooms.
The home is currently listed for $299,000. We offered $274,000.
We basically do not want to pay more than $285,000 for it given the work we have to do. For the deal to work for us, we need to have some equity in it after the work is done. That way we can give the kind of returns we like to offer our joint venture partners (at least 15% per year ROI) while still ensuring we make decent money off all our efforts.
And quite frankly, given the slow pace of the market and the fact that the home has been listed for nearly 160 days, an offer of $274,000 didn’t seem that aggressive.
Apparently the sellers agent disagreed and was rather upset. The sellers countered our offer at $298,000. 
And the sellers agent was so upset he called his Mom to complain. His Mom, a former agent herself, was furious and called our agent to chew her out.
Our agent took the spanking like a trooper and bit her tongue instead of commenting on the quality of job the sellers agent was doing in the first place to have a listing on the market for half a year. When the agents Mommy said “When your buyers are serious have them submit a real offer” our agent had enough grace not to tell them to pound sand.
Yep … this really happened yesterday.
December was the slowest month in a decade in terms of the number of sales in the Nanaimo real estate market. As an agent aren’t you interested in doing deals after such a slow month?? Yea – maybe your clients were upset by the offer but shouldn’t you try to find a way to make a deal instead of getting mad at everyone involved? Second of all, do you think that this is the only deal you’ll ever have listed that we would make an offer on?? Well, it might be now.
And even beyond us, aren’t you shooting yourself in the foot in a big way by treating our agent this way?? Despite the slow market she is doing a very steady business. She was a top 10 sales person in her office in December despite the slow market. Yesterday she was working on 3 different offers – only one of them was ours. She has a lot of buyer clients that are always buying property. Don’t you think you might want to be her friend not her enemy?
And more importantly don’t you wonder what kind of message it sends to the world when your Mom fights your battles for you?!!!
I found this story entertaining so I wanted to share it. I don’t have a major point really except to tell you that there are ALWAYS reasons why a house has been on the market a long time. Sometimes it’s because there are big issues with the home but often it’s actually because there is a ridiculously stubborn seller behind it or an incompetent or lazy real estate agent. In fact, some of the houses we’ve been in recently that we thought would take forever to sell because of major problems have sold quickly and I bet it is simply because the people involved actually work to put deals together.
When you look at a house and wonder why it’s been on the market for so long you can never discount the fact that it often has absolutely nothing to do with the house and everything to do with the people involved in the sale of that property.
