Real Estate Feast

How I sold an impossible to sell house–Part Two

In case you missed Part One, here it is.

Before meeting with Theresa and her daughter and son-in-law, I toured the neighborhood sincerely wishing I was driving a beat up old car and packing a pistol. The house next door had a mattress on the front yard and the windows were broken. Some guys were lounging on the porch with a boom box and beers. The two houses across the street had every opening barred and the yards fenced in. Really big, really ugly dogs didn’t like the way that I looked at their domains. I imagined them contentedly gnawing on the bones of burglars stupid enough to go through the gates.

I spent about two hours with the family at the kitchen table going over comparable sales and paperwork and talking about how we might sell this house and to whom. Theresa had a price below which she didn’t want to go, and I thought at the time that it was realistic based on what else had sold.

It was not realistic.

My listing began, “Old Florida gem…” and went on to describe the strongly built house with fairly new roof as perfect for someone who wanted to walk to work in the Civic Center or as an investment.

The sign went up in the yard and I got a lot of calls from neighbors and friends and family of neighbors. “Wow, you want that much for that house in this neighborhood?” was the basic response in various languages and degrees of shock.

Two brave brokers showed up for a broker’s open (thanks Anita and Victor).

Some people casing the joint showed up for an open house one Sunday.

Ads targeting investors in the commercial properties section in the Miami Herald delivered exactly zero responses.

Postcards to the surrounding area were equally successful.

And then I had a stroke of genius.

My stroke of genius was that the only people who would buy this place were investors who already owned property in the area. People who were betting that the area, which was already coming back as evidenced by the big condos being built all around, would be a sound investment.

So I went to the handy-dandy tax section on the MLXchange and called up a list of all the properties in the subsection. Then I sorted all the properties by owner names. Then I made a list of all the people who owned three or more properties. It was a fairly short list, about thirty prospects.

I mailed first class letters with information about the listing. About ten were returned as undeliverable (very reliable data in the tax rolls–not), but I did get a nibble.

I’ll tell you how the nibble turned into a strike tomorrow.

If you’d like to find out more about South Florida real estate or have an impossible to sell house you’d like to sell, you can reach me at 305-401-8058 or bishopric.r@ewm.com.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 9:46 am and is filed under Real Estate News, Selling a Home in South Florida. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. Melody Anderson said at November 25th, 2008 at 2:12 pm

   I have a guess of how the story ends. I look forward to reading it. What a smart idea you had to look up the property owners in the area! Congratulations on your site, Bob. It looks fantastic. I’ll look forward to returning often.

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