I spent like an hour in a vacant listing today. This is a nice house. The location is great. The issue is that it isn’t extremely nice and it isn’t subpar either. See, if it were extremely nice, it would have sold by now. And if were really subpar, the price would be low enough to attract a buyer looking for a deal…..but what I have is an average house with an average price for the neighborhood. Sometimes those are the toughest ones to sell.

This house could use more fresh paint. The hardware and most of the lighting are outdated. I think a lot of realtors and sellers look at a house like this and think of ways to add a WOW factor. Wow is fun. Wow also costs a lot of money. Wow also doesn’t erase the negatives. It has been my experience that you can have a lot of recent updates, but nobody will buy it if there are still several negatives. Granite won’t sell a house with stained carpet. New stainless appliances won’t make up for the worn out vinyl floor in the hall bath with the seam curling up.

So, what should you do? Focus on eliminating the worst offending negatives. Buyers come to a showing hoping this will be the house they will fall in love with. Most buyers can overlook a few minor things because they know they can’t get 100% of their dream house. As they walk around the house, the negatives slap them up one side of the face and down the other……It’s like seeing somebody dressed really well and all you can focus on is the stain on their shirt. It is just too hard for buyers to get past that. The more negatives you have, the harder it is. You don’t have to be an experienced realtor to know that, just watch an episode of House Hunters on HGTV.

Eliminating the worst negatives is by far cheaper and more effective than spending money on one Wow feature.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. Ready?

Here it is: There is a buyer for every house.

Yeah, really. No joke.

I’ve seen some unusual houses in the past 9.5 years of being a realtor. The more unusual thing is that I’ve seen a lot of them sell. I can’t tell you how many times I am scrolling through the newly sold listings and say to myself “I can’t believe somebody bought that house??”

How is this for unusual:

Half million dollar townhouses in a rural neighborhood with a view of a farm? Townhouses that are not…..in high density areas. Interesting. There are still a lot of them for sale, but many have sold. One for over a million bucks!

A duplex on a busy road that looks like a space ship? I am not making this up. I’ve actually been inside this one.

Worn out old houses that have been renovated with scrap wood and recycled bits? There is a company in town that flips a lot of old houses this way. Their end product is…..interesting. It isn’t my cup of tea, but many of my buyers have really liked them. I’ve always joked privately that these flippers raid construction site dumpsters, smoke a little crack, then devise their design. I guess I just went public with my opinion. Oh well, but the point of this post is that there is a buyer for everything. What one person sees as undesirable is the exact thing that attracts another buyer.

One of my more interesting listings was an old house, that had been made new inside, on a few acres, located on the edge of town. To complicate matters, neither the master bedroom nor master bathroom had doors. So, I needed a buyer who wanted an old house on land, that was like a new home inside and was not in the country, and who didn’t care about privacy. It took a while, but we found such a buyer, who told us at the closing they had been looking for the right house for years.

Sooooo, when I get a unique listing, I try to market what makes it unique rather than hide it…..and remind myself that it too will sell since there is a buyer for every house.

I don’t brag when I sell a good house quickly. In a market where the best listings sell fast regardless of who the listing agent is, it is pointless…….Yes, you can have lousy pictures, generic marketing remarks and a dingbat realtor. If your house has the right location and is updated, it will sell fast these days. No point in trying to claim it as a personal victory any more.

But, what if you don’t have one of those houses? What if you get a contract really quick and your dingbat agent doesn’t know how to keep it glued together after a rough inspection, appraisal issue, or any other problem that often happens in real estate deals?

I don’t know about other agents, but these situations are what I use to test my mettle.

I just closed a deal earlier today that was a challenge. It was a great house. So great it sold the first day on the market for the full asking price. Then it fell apart due to the inspection. But guess what? I had an agent on the back burner with a buyer who wanted it. I had them write a back up offer hoping that it would encourage the primary buyer to accept my seller’s terms. They wrote it for $1000 over the asking price. When the first deal finally did fall apart, we jumped right into the new deal. Then this buyer got skiddish after the home inspection just like the first buyer. Knowing the odds of having a back up buyer for the back up buyer were slim, we had to work with this current buyer. Long story short, after a lot of negotiation and many estimates to fix a problem, we got it worked out. It was extremely volatile. I was really pretty nervous….more so than I am sure I let on to my sellers!

I got lucky though. My sellers took the advice I gave them. Sometimes people do and sometimes they don’t. It usually goes much smoother when they do. I’ve got nearly a decade of experience in walking the tight rope of getting deals to the closing table. I think I used every bit of my experience on this deal. So I will boast not about selling it so fast, but about the fact that my sellers are now moving on to where they want to be and are happy.

I’ve had 5 deals this year that all had something in common. I was the 2nd agent to list the houses. They did not sell the first time they were listed.

One of them was in Winchester. It is a nice house. Like most houses, it needed a few tweaks to make it sell. The previous agent didn’t offer the seller any advice. The presentation was terrible. The pictures looked like they were taken with a cell phone, then printed, scanned and uploaded. I’ve had granola bars that were less grainy.

We did some painting. Moved some furniture, replaced a counter top. I presented it well. I even raised the list price by $1000 compared to the last agent. Within 7 days, it sells.

The next one actually sold before I had time to make pictures. I got two showings on this place before I listed it just from networking. I was so relieved because I didn’t have to pay my photographer to shoot it! I listed it for $600 more than the last agent.

Another one took a while to sell since it was a unique property, but I got it done. This was an older house in an area where a lot of younger people are buying. It came across a little dated, so we spruced it up, did my old “Two Adirondack chairs and a firepit” trick in the backyard and sold it.

I sold another one by word of mouth. I was actually presenting the offer at the same time the seller was signing the listing docs.

The last one was on acreage in Jessamine Co. It was a nice house, but was presented terribly. The previous agent was so sorry she never came back to get her lockbox off their door.

All of these were sellable properties. On a couple of them, the first agent just didn’t know how to price the house. On others the first agent didn’t know how to make the house appealing both online and in person to buyers. And on all of them, according to the sellers, the first agents never gave them any feedback on why their house was not selling. All of these sellers were willing to make needed adjustments. I think it is a shame they had to suffer with their house on the market for 6 or more months like that.