First Listing Success

[Peter Mckernan]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to post about my first residential listing success. I was approached by one of my very good friends and co-worker to help him list his house on the MLS. I of course was very welcoming to the idea since I would enjoy getting the experience for future investment purchases and also the gained capital towards future investments.

My friend owned the house for seven years and while he owned the house he slowly rehabbed everything including the landscape, the interior, and exterior. The house was in an older area of a city that has a high crime rate; however, the area held the value higher than other areas of the city due to the country club it was next, and many other factors. He listed the house by himself as FSBO for over a month and got only a few legitimate responses. These responses fell through and he finally got feed up with the headache of dealing with buyers that were not as serious as they should be, and buyers that did not have their finances in order. So, after dealing with those buyers that fell through he asked me for the listing help.

Once I listed his house I was confident that the house would sell quick due to the fact of how great it looked and also the area of the city it was in compared to other parts of the city. We listed the house for $275,000 and he was firm on that price. The house is a 4/2 with a square footage of 1818. The comps in the area were pulled 0-90 days back of course, and a range of prices from $265,000-$285,000. The properties at $265,000 were 3/2s and a hundred square feet less than my friend's house. The properties higher than $275,000 had the same square footage with more bathrooms. Once again, I was confident in the price we listed it at, we just needed to find a buyer that would be able to qualify.

My confidence on the property increased and decreased throughout the listing. We had the property on the market for 35 days in total. The reason that it stayed on the market for so long is because we went through a lot of people that could not qualify. It was tough to actually find a person that would be able to pass our cross-quailification process. We got someone passed the cross-qualification process and closed escrow yesterday. 

This was a long process of course, but I learned so much from this one experience. I plan to use my license to help reduce the costs of acquisition in any transaction, and also build my property management company; however, I do enjoy learning and building capital by helping people buy and sell homes when they ask.