10/08/2024
Successful For Sale By Owner actually begins the day you first purchase your home and offers benefits not offered by the Real Estate Brokerage system. Transparent, honest collaboration with integrity and generosity at the helm can result in success and friendship.
Ash's Fourth Real Estate Story Part 2:
Year Long Real Estate Adventures
None of my past real estate experiences prepared me for those waiting for me when I decided to put my Las Cruces home on the market.
My partner and I had been residing in the home while we were building a new rammed-earth casita thirty minutes away, near Old Mesilla and close to the Rio Grande River and the Bosque. We had unmet expectations. for completion of the casita and signed with a realtor pre-maturely. Yet, sign we did.
The first realtor was a recommendation from a mortgage lender. The older than me gentleman drove up from El Paso and held an Open House without my approval. As luck would have it, a local realtor walked in with a buyer and they made a cash offer--with zero earnest money. We were in Utah when the offer came in. With a Utah real estate history of large sums serving as earnest money, we asked for earnest money before considering the offer. Neither realtor seemed to think the earnest money was an issue and did not persuade the potential buyer to express their sincerity with any sort of deposit. We thought this must be a joke and a scam. We declined the offer. Our realtor was furious with us and lost interest in selling our home. Our banker wasn't interested in us any more either.
The second realtor was young and full of energy. He helped us powerwash and clean up outside of the home. He took great photos. He invited other realtors to showings. Eventually, we had another offer...one with a $500 earnest money deposit (typical, we learned, for Las Cruces) and a contingency--they had to sell their home first. They sold their home right away and they started moving out of their home. We finished moving out of ours. Our closing was approaching and we were taking a break, enjoying ourselves in a restaurant, making lighting decisions for our casita over drinks, when a call from our realtor came in on my phone. He informed us that our buyers' buyers had backed out of their deal and consequently, they were backing out of our contract. Neither realtor assisted us in our efforts to keep our purchase agreement from falling apart. Feeling gut-punched, we got up to leave for home. On the way out, a couple of lovely women stopped us to express envy for how much fun we were having together! As chance encounters can be, one of the women so happened to be the realtor who had submitted the cash offer without an earnest deposit. Let that sink in. She informed us that the offer had been legitimate. Without an earnest deposit, from our perspective, it was not;
however, we became friends.
Important lesson: Contingencies are fraught with opportunities for failure.
Over the next several months, various realtors with various anomalies showed our home--each showing required us to hurry and spruce up the home and leave in time for the showing. It was very stressful. Some preposterous offers were made--meaning ones with very low offers and requests for us to carry the note ourselves. Our realtor eventually lost interest and failed to return my calls or calls from other realtors. Keep in mind that this whole time, my home showed well. It was in remarkable condition and passed inspection easily and appraised above the asking price.
A year later, when our contract with the real estate agent had terminated, and we were living in the casita, our home was move-in ready. We decided that all we wanted from real estate representatives was a buyer. Our approach was to call various real estate agents with various brokerages and invite them to private showings. As each real estate agent met with us, we explained to them that if they found a buyer for our property that we would sign the contract.
We met some great realtors who all loved the home but did not bring us a buyer. I resorted to holding my own open house. An investor came to that open house who would have made an offer, but she wanted us to carry the note. I already had learned my lesson about that. I am not a bank and do not want to be one. The investor told us she had sold many properties FSBO. She encouraged me to post the listing on Zillow and Facebook and NextDoor. I took her advice and also made posters that I distributed wherever I deemed to have potential.
We had responses but no offers. Finally, one of the realtors we had met with began showing our home to a buyer from Albuquerque. He showed it several times to the same buyer before calling me to inform me that his buyer was ready to make an offer. The buyer's realtor did not represent the buyer well and from our perspective, lied to us about the buyer and lied to the buyer about us. No offer ever came to my email.
The buyers from Albuquerque were not to be deterred. One day, I received a call from a gentleman in Albuquerque who asked me to tell him about my home. He did not tell me how he found my home nor did he mention his realtor. We scheduled a meeting and showing of the home for the following Sunday.
Thursday, his realtor reaches out to me to inform me that my interested party is indeed the party he had been showing the home to for some time now. My response was, "then I suspect this guy is wasting our time."
On Saturday, the buyer from Albuquerque calls me again. He mentions that since neither of us has signed a contract with the realtor that we have options that could save us both plenty of money. I responded by pointing out that we had both asked this realtor to do something--he had asked him to find him a home, and I had asked him to bring me a buyer. From my perspective, this realtor had indeed done what each of us had asked him to do, and therefore, each of us were liable for one-half of his commission. He agreed.
While on that call together, we negotiated our contract between us. He agreed to offer my full price, to split all of our closing costs, 50/50, and to provide a $10,000 earnest money deposit to the title company. Appreciate the value of buyer and seller negotiating without realtors between them. Many things were accomplished in this negotiation which realtors would not believe possible.
I called the realtor and told him what we had negotiated, and told him that his job was to not mess this up. I also asked him to bring apple croissants to the meeting the next day.
On Sunday morning, the realtor arrived with the croissants, the buyers arrived in their truck, I met them at the door, greeting them with, "Welcome Home!" and giving them hugs. I introduced everyone to my Ricky.
After touring the home again and answering questions, we all sat down and filled out the contract according to what we had negotiated the evening before. The buyer expressed over and over how much he loved and wanted this home. He also recognized that his purchase came with built in equity as my asking price was well below market value.
We all signed the contract of the century. Now we are consulting each other daily as we move toward closing. We really like our buyers a lot and look forward to being friends--having started out on the right foot.
As we were leaving, we decided to show our buyers how our digital entry system worked--the batteries died after locking and would not unlock. Memorable. We switched out the batteries and reset the codes. No deal is memorable with a humorous quirk--something has to go wrong--right?
There you have it. We are scheduled to close in October--on the same day I closed in 2018. Fingers crossed everyone.
Thank you for reading!
