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.

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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