Fliperati

So what happened after the November buyers fizzled out?  Well, losing out on a good deal is never pleasant and I took this loss particularly hard.  This was the first time I had ever tried to sell a property and it was beginning to feel like an impossible feat.  The fact that this couple couldn’t get their sh*t together and close on a house that they clearly were in love with made me wonder how I was ever going to find someone with both the desire and the means to buy the house.  It was also frustrating to work with people who approach major decisions (such as buying your first home) in such a lackadaisical manner.  

Although I never took the house off the market and continued to show it sporadically while I was working with the November buyers, I didn’t market it nearly as aggressively as I otherwise would have.  One of the (many) mistakes I made was that I was (irrationally) optimistic about the ability of the November buyers to close on the house and I was lazy about responding to the requests I would get for additional information / showings from other potential buyers (whereas it never took me more than a few minutes to respond to buyer inquiries before I had the offer).  I even ignored a few inquiries from people who didn’t sound very interested or prepared.  Actually, I started ignoring quite a few inquiries after getting burned by a buyer who convinced me to set up an appointment to view the property at a very inconvenient time and then turned out to be a no-show.  I know, I know…  This is a terrible business strategy, but it’s hard to describe how terribly disillusioned I was by the average buyer’s lack of competence and seriousness.

This attitude worsened once the November buyers were out of the picture and I think I only showed the property a handful of times in December.  Fortunately, I had a trip planned for early January and there were a number buyers who were asking to see the house and could only come the week I was out of town.  This prompted me to consider hiring a real estate agent to take over the showings and inject new life into the marketing campaign.  I held real estate agents in pretty low regard by this point (mostly because of their poor manners when showing my property — leaving the door unlocked, leaving the toilet unflushed, leaving lights on, etc), so my willingness to sign a listing agreement was a good indicator of my exasperation with the sale process.  Of the scores of agents that had shown my property, I had a good impression of only two or three of them.  That made it easy to choose someone to take over the listing and I’ll share more about that in another post.