Every House Has A Buyer...It Just Takes Time For Them To Meet.
I truly believe that no matter how long a house has been on the market, no matter how many agents list it and lose it or how many showings it has had, every house on the market out there has a buyer somewhere.
The wait can be unbearable no doubt and not everyone can afford to do it or have the backbone to have a house on the market for a couple of years. Some houses just sit and sit and the best efforts of the real estate agent come up with nothing. Sometimes the agent is to blame by not marketing the house to it’s full potential or by listing the house with incorrect information, not the correct size, wrong number of bedrooms, saying the house is in the city limits and subject to higher property taxes when in fact it’s not.Why won't my house sell?
There are many reasons why a house won't sell but if it’s been on the market for a couple of years it’s probably one or two big reasons. I recently showed a house to my clients that has been on the market for 880 days. The house appeared to have everything my clients were looking for and it was priced about right if a little high, but we were fascinated as to what we would find. Well we found nothing out of the ordinary and so my client asked if we could show it again with her husband this time. He loved the house and they were talking about an offer, as I was checking the doors to leave, in the basement I noticed a pipe coming out of the floor and I immediately realized why the house had not sold. It was a Radon remediation system that was pulling Radon gas from under the house and venting it above the roof. My clients had not heard of Radon but once they did the house was off the list.
My listing that wouldn't sell was a beautiful home in Clayton but it had one overriding factor that came up time and time again and that was the layout. It was built in 1993 and had lots of rooms, it had a dining room, a living room, a kitchen and they all had walls, not what today's buyer is looking for. It had gold faucets (not real) but again not what sells these days. My sellers were not living there, it was paid for and they used it a couple of times a year so there was no urgency to sell.
Does changing agents sometime help a house to sell?
I should point out that I was the fourth agent to list the house and all other attempts had failed. It was originally listed by the first agent for $349,000 in the height of the recession in January of 2009 and I got it in May 2011 and would only take the listing if the sellers agreed to price it under $300,000 which they did.We sold it two years later for $215,000. By this time the sellers had had enough and realized that in order to sell it they would have to either lower the price or spend a lot of money on upgrades.
So never give up hope, if your house has languished on the market for years, take a hard look at it or better yet have a couple of unattached people take a look at it and give you the hard truth. Is it being marketed correctly? Is the information about the house correct and up to date? How many pictures of your house are on the web, is there a video, is it cluttered? Hang in there if you can, every house has a buyer they just haven’t met yet.
If you want me to take a look at it send me an email to irishdavid2011@gmail.com
