There is peak urgency during the first week of a listing, but after that they get stale quickly.
Consider the Mission Hills REO on Hunter St., originally listed for $429,900 on May 19th. We had four offers come in the first week, and after a round of highest-and-best, agreed to a $453,375 deal, in part due to this comment from their agent:
These buyers are very qualified to purchase this home and take care of the obvious, and maybe not so obvious, problems that exist. They are well aware this is an “as is” sale.
As you can imagine, that was the kiss of death. The buyers completed their home inspection, and instead of asking for any help, they cancel the sale immediately.
We go back on the market on June 3rd, but by then we were looking like day-old doughnuts.
Or week-old, once you read the inspection, which made it sound like the house was falling down. I attached the inspection report to the MLS listing, because I’d rather have it all out in the open, and deal with it; rather than agree to a sale and try to gloss it over later with the new buyers (by law, all reports must be disclosed to the next buyers).
Bank of America lowered the price to $419,152, but now we’re getting offers in the $300,000s. Yesterday the asset manager countered full price.
I’ll be on-duty today, having open house 12-3, in hopes of re-igniting some urgency. This example is somewhat exaggerated due to the house’s condition, but it does demostrate how fast a listing can go cold. Here is the original video – I’ll do another when I’m there today to gauge market activity:
The San Diego crop of this vintage Arts & Crafts bungalows all suffer from the same structural flaw: Stem-wall foundations with weak or nonexistant footings. Further, these are not structurally-engineered concrete foundations; rather, they are site-mixed cobble-clast and mortar with sometimes a lime stucco weather coating. Most of the sand in the mix simply came-up from the beach and is not washed – thus there is salt and calcium efflorescing after a few decades. There are several spcialist firms that will redo this structure in the 40-50K range. While under there, the house will be elevated to about a 24-inch crawlspace or higher and one can then redo both electrical, gass and water pipes very easily.