Moving

And finally, sell your house

It took nearly six months, two sets of realtors, hundreds of emails, and thousands of dollars but at last we are no longer property owners in Virginia. Some people are aware of the comedy of errors/fiasco/disaster that our journey has been but I share more generally as a form of therapy.

Sold!

Back in February, we received a typical marketing letter from a local realtor stating that they had clients who were interested in a house in our neighborhood and if we had ever considered selling then they would love to hear from us. We knew then that there was a small chance of relocation but even if that wasn’t an issue, we had already decided that as empty nesters we certainly didn’t need 5 bedrooms and 3.5 baths. So we investigated. We met with the sender of the letter* who asserted that he had two potential buyers lined up for our neighborhood and then shared all kinds of statistics on how successful his brokerage is. We let him know that we had no firm date for moving as our destination was still in question. We had him come by and view the house which he declared to be like a “show house” and would be able to command top dollar. We were worried that our lack of neutral palette would be a problem but since we had brought in a color consultant and had things professionally designed, it was declared a strength not a weakness. Given that we had bought the house at nearly the height of the market (June 2006), we had grave concerns about how much we would lose by selling when the housing market hadn’t quite fully recovered. (The downside to being an economist is that you tend to pay attention to such things which can sometimes be depressing.) We met again to discuss details and he suggested a marketing strategy that he thought would work to basically sell the house for what we paid for it 8 years prior. It was a good sales pitch; we bought it and signed on the dotted line. The fact that it took 3 rounds of back and forth to get the listing agreement right should have been a clue where things would head. We wanted several changes that took a great deal of effort to get put into the contract correctly. Primary was that we didn’t want to have the listing agreement go beyond the end of June. That would give them just over 90 days to sell our house. Their original date in the contract was August 2015! Who signs a listing agreement for more than a year!!!

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Too many trees?

That is apparently the latest reason we’ve gotten why buyers aren’t interested in our house.  It has too many trees.  Really?  What did you expect for a home advertised as having a “wooded lot”.

We love our current house; it’s been home for 8 years and has hosted track sleepovers, theater cast parties, fondue nights, massive barbeques, whiskey tastings, pool tournaments and countless smaller events that make it hard to think of moving on.  But we will and we will build new memories in our new house.  I’d prefer to concentrate on that part than worry about when we aren’t going to own two houses.

The real estate purchase process is an odd beast.  Having been on both sides of it – simultaneously – I wonder if I’m a lousy buyer or a lousy seller.  When we went to Kansas City to buy a house, we visited 16 houses in 2 days, an exhausting and thrilling time that resulted in a contract on our new house.  We also saw houses that weren’t the right fit so I understand that.  We saw houses with rooms that you had to walk through to get to other rooms, master bedrooms without a private bath, full bathrooms that opened off the kitchen, yards that were completely decked over with no grass, and others that had peccadilloes that made them not be the perfect house for us.  I do recall having thoughts like “yard needs work” and “that room will need to be painted” as mental notes of changes that we would make rather than reasons not to buy the house.  And yes there were houses that would just require more TLC than we were willing to do no matter what the price. We told our realtor these things and expected her to pass them along to the seller.

Which is why I’m wondering about some of the “feedback” we are hearing on our house.  When we moved in the entire house was a either pale yellow or pale peach.  Ugh.  But we waited a year to decide what we wanted to do with it then hired a color consultant who created a beautiful color palate for us.  This resulted in a butterscotch hallway, blue kitchen, stone living room and family room on the first floor.  All well coordinated and beautifully painted.

entrance livingroom Master

We understood that the red sitting room, dill pickle green bathroom and seafoam bedroom may not be to everyone’s liking.  But most people never mentioned color.  In fact, we got very little feed back from our realtors other than “not the right fit” (that’s another rant for another day).  When we did get suggestions – landscaping is rough – we fixed it.  Some were questionable (well the trash cans are at the side of the house and that ruins the curb appeal.  WTF?) but we fixed it anyway. Then after more than 2 months on the market and watching other houses in the neighborhood being sold quickly by the same realtor, the suggestion that we needed to be more neutral was made.  (Doing yoga breathing to keep temper at bay.)

redsittingroombluekitchen picklebathroom

So gone is the blue kitchen, dill pickle green bathroom and red sitting room among others,  Hello beige and white.  Ugh.  Because we still live here, I refuse to lose my butterscotch hallway with the matching original artwork and the seafoam bedroom that I still sleep in. And now we don’t hear about color, landscaping or trash cans.  Now the reason we are given for buyers not liking our house is “Too many trees”.  Sorry, that’s just too damn bad.  I’ll carry two mortgages until we find someone who appreciates trees.

(Photos copyright MRIS and used without permission because it’s my house.)

First, buy a house.

Or should that be “first, sell your house”.  Well if it is, we did it backwards.  We bought a house in Kansas City and still have to sell our house in VA.  {sigh}

The house hunting trip was obviously a success.  We saw 16 houses in two days.  Not all of them were in the same condition.  One was obviously occupied by angry renters.  I can’t think of any other reason for the state of the house (dog shit on the kitchen floor, bath tub full of water, toilet not flushed, toys everywhere) because there was no way that anyone was going to buy it in the state it was in. Good thing that was the first house we saw so it had to get better as the days went on. Several were just not workable for us (no closet space or no en suite for the master bedroom) and others just needed more TLC than we have the energy to provide. Two of which were serious contenders and there was a third that would have worked out as well. We bought the best one – of course. It’s less than 6 miles from my work – a 15 minute commute – and walking distance to shops and restaurants.

Not only were we looking for a house, we wanted to see how Kansas City felt as home so we dragged Jesse-the-college-student-daughter-who-used-to-go-by-Gillian along with us.  She was a fabulous help keeping us sane and her set design skills were invaluable (“No mom, the dining room table will not fit in this room.”) But we also wanted to see if she liked the city itself.  We’ve decided that it’s a good fit for us (don’t ask if that decision came before or after we decided to move there) but how horrible would it be for the kids to come visit?

Apparently not too horrible.  We ate barbeque, walked all over several neighborhoods, went to the theater, had Christopher Elbow hot chocolate, eavesdropped on an open air heavy metal tribute band, had dinner with with a friend from the Bank and his family, visited the world’s largest furniture store (Nebraska Furniture Mart – holy big box store Batman), ate delicious gluten free pizza while guessing at old Trivial Pursuit cards, visited a few outlying towns and squeezed in a winery as well. All in all, not a bad weekend.

Now we have to figure out how to figure out what is going with us and what is not.  Apparently, you can’t fit the furniture from a 3600 sq ft house into a 1900 sq ft house.  Keep your eyes peeled for the furniture bargains once we get it all sorted!

/san/