If doctors make the worst patients, do real estate agents make the worst home sellers, or are they the first to take the advice they’re giving to clients in the current market?
Naperville real estate agent Scott Persin put his four-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath home on the market last week and he’s telling himself not to expect a repeat of 2 1/2 years ago, when he sold a previous house to buy this one.
Back then, the market was starting its downturn. “I told myself I have to practice everything I preached to my clients,” he recalled. “It was very hard to price it. You want to take every dollar you can out of your home. It was tough to list it where the numbers directed me to rather than what my heart said.”
With the right pricing, that home sold in two weeks. Persin is taking the same approach this time, but pricing it was even harder and he isn’t expecting the same fast results, despite the fact that he sees a little optimism resurfacing in the market.
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He paid $465,000 for the house and put $30,000 in upgrades into it that, thankfully, kept it neutral. Now he’s cleaned out the closets and listed it for $499,000, so he’ll lose money when it’s all said and done. Pricing was difficult because three of the five comparable properties he found that sold during the past two years were foreclosures so he pooled numbers from similar neighborhoods.
“It’s definitely eye-opening,” he said. “I have those difficult conversations with builders and sellers every week. I’ve seen the hardship for my clients. At the end of the day, you have to look at the numbers. It’s difficult to see your equity vanish but at the end of the day it’s what you have to do to sell the house.”
Another knock against Persin’s house is that it has an inground pool, which limits the number of interested buyers. So while the house is listed, he’s really not going to actively market it until the weather improves and he can showcase the pool.
Meanwhile in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, real estate agent David Bolick finds himself in the same position as others trying to sell investment properties. A few years ago, he bought a “granny shack” for its location, razed it and replaced it with a three-story home he originally priced at $2.15 million.
Several price drops later, it’s been reduced to $1.699 million and he’s not in charge of his own sale. He listed it with an agent who specializes in high-end properties, one who negotiated a good deal for a seller down the street. He took the agent’s advice and brought in a stager.
His thinking now sounds a lot like everybody else’s. “Now I just want to get back the money I have in it and get my life back and take my marbles and play somewhere else,” Bolick said. “I think the market is very strange, but it’s changing. There’s a lot of deals for people who are liquid and can qualify.”
Meanwhile, Mark Weiss, president of his eponymous Chicago real estate firm, is taking a different tact as he tries to sell the Lincoln Park home he moved from three years ago.
When it originally went on the market in the summer of 2006 for $1.595 million, he had more than 150 showings but not one offer. In June 2007, he opted to rent it out to generate some income from the property and picked a young family he believed would care for the property like they owned it.
The family moved out last month and Weiss again began showing it, now listed at $1.275 million. However he’s also still offering it as a $6,700 rental and last week received a phone call from a couple interested in renting it because they were going to lose their home to foreclosure.
Aside from touching up some paint, he isn’t paying to stage the house because he doesn’t think it will make much difference. “You can keep things clean and make it look good, but if no one is interested, it doesn’t matter,” Weiss said. “We’re seeing people who want to be in the community but they’re not comfortable in the marketplace.”
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