Real Estate Feast

How I sold an impossible to sell house–The End

Here are Part One and Part Two.

By now it was April and I was on a late-season skiing vacation with my wife’s family in Park City, Utah. I’m sitting in front of the fire nursing a brandy deciding whether to jump into the hot tub or read a book while everybody else is up on the mountain throwing themselves downhill on sticks of wood, probably breaking tibias and fibias and whatnot even as we speak.

The cell phone rings and a very nice guy named Jim and I talk about the house. He says he already stopped by and introduced himself and Theresa showed him the property. And he says he’d like to buy it. Would pay cash, thank you. Wow, I should go on vacation more often.

He was offering about a hundred and fifty thousand less than Theresa wanted. So I gulped and called Theresa and she said that he made the same offer to her and she showed him the door and said don’t let it hit you on the way out.

Theresa moved out of the house to Plant City to live with her daughter and family. She left a lot of furniture and miscellaneous stuff behind which she wanted the neighbors to have.

I stayed in touch with Jim over the next few months and Theresa reluctantly lowered her price several times. I thought the deal was possible when I got Jim to increase his offer and Theresa’s family put pressure on her to sell.

We made a deal! It was for less than Theresa wanted and for more than Jim wanted to pay, so I guess it was fair.

With Theresa’s blessings, I went down on a Saturday and knocked on the neighbors’ doors and said “free furniture”. Soon everybody in the neighborhood streamed out of their houses like ants and cleaned the place out down to the last leftover fork in the kitchen drawers. Even the guy who worked at the crematorium, still wearing his rubber gloves—he took a couple of end tables. The guys in the crack house next door took the mattresses; I think the ones in their front yard needed replacing.

It was fun giving everything away, especially to people who could really use the stuff.

If you’ve got an impossible to sell house you want to sell, or would just like to talk about South Florida real estate, you can reach me at 305-401-8058 or bishopric.r@ewm.com.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 2:38 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.

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