The Trials and Tribulations of Selling a House
When we started this journey of selling our house I never in my wildest dreams thought it would take close to four months to sell our home in Central Park (formally known as Stapleton). Nor did I think it would take two realtors (three if you count the husband-and-wife team as two separate realtors) to do it! I’ve learned a lot from this experience and hopefully will be able to apply this knowledge to the purchase of our next property in Palisade! But I’m getting ahead of myself, for this post I’d like to share what I’ve learned while on this journey. Since any journey starts with the first step that is where I will begin.
Step one: The decision to sell
Lesson one: ‘timing really is everything’! May of 2022 the real estate market was on fire! This flame started even before then with May being the peak, the housing inventory was in short supply and houses in Central Park and even on our block were going for over a million dollars and were on the market less than a day. Seeing what was going on, I convinced Andy (no small feat) now was the time for us to sell our house and get this Palisade dream going. We reached out to the realtors who helped us sell our last house and who also helped us buy/build this one. Over the years they stayed in touch and on friendly terms. The friendliness went south when we decided to change realtors because the house wasn’t selling.
Lesson two: selling a house is business and it is totally different than buying a house. When you buy a house, the realtor is helping you spend your money, when you are selling a house, they are supposed to help you make money. When making money is involved and it starts to go south then it can also get nasty, it shouldn’t but it can and sadly it did.
The last time we sold a house, we were still living in it and our girls were smaller, so it was easier to keep it clean(er), plus we only had one dog. This time our girls were adults and we had two dogs so I thought it would make more sense to move out and stage the house as part of the sales process. This theory was sound, but it didn’t quite work out as planned, not right away that is.
Step two: The packing
Making the decision to sell is one thing, getting the house ready to sell is another thing entirely. Getting the house ready to sell when some of the occupants living in the house didn’t really want to move made it even harder! The occupants in question being both Andy and Bella. Snails move faster than these two when it came to packing!
Lesson three: Although ‘till death do us part’ applies to one’s husband it does not apply to one’s children and after this experience and the absolute mess of Bella’s room, Tessa’s too for that matter, once your kids move out… make it clear they are not moving back in, especially when they have no regard to your house rules!
After finding and securing a storage unit in which to store all our belongings, I packed up my studio and the artwork throughout the house first. I did this mostly by myself (I did however need help to move the ceramic wheel and the flat file). In all this took me about three weeks to complete, putting us in June. It should be noted here, the market started to cool a bit by this time, but houses were still going for above average prices.
With the studio and the artwork in storage, I began to pack up the rest of the house, luckily mom decided to step in and help (she has decades of packing and moving experience) which was a God send! She took on the kitchen, packing up the mirrors, and a good portion of the other breakables in the house. While she was doing this, Andy and I started to move the furniture. Rather than hire movers to move the house, we decided since we were just moving it to storage, we’d move the majority of it ourselves and then hire movers to take on the big stuff, which was also the heaviest items.
Lesson four: it is okay to pack your house yourself but bite the bullet and hire experienced movers to move your house. It will go a lot faster. Also, key word here is ‘experienced’ movers. I did call around and got quotes from three different movers and we chose the one in the middle regarding pricing. I should have paid more attention to the details regarding how they moved… long story short, our movers were late, I’m pretty sure one of them was either hung over or sick, they didn’t wrap the furniture, ended up destroying my Buckskin slipcover on our couch which was about $5,000, and when we submitted the damage claim, they paid us $50. The devil is in the details, pay the extra money to ensure your property is well taken care of!
Moving an entire household by yourself, with someone whom I later discovered, wasn’t quite so keen on this change, can really test a marriage (luckily ours survived). To make matters worse, I got Covid in the middle of the move and Andy followed suit. At this point, one should never doubt the power of my determination and so Andy and I both continue to move the house to storage Covid be dammed (it should be noted that no one was ever at the storage unit when we were there, so we never put anyone else in danger of getting Covid). Once most of the house was packed away, it was time to start working on the house itself.
Step three: Fixing up a house
Lesson five: NEVER defer maintenance on your house! It will bite you in your butt big time! We did a walk thought with our realtors (the first set) to see what needed to be done. Some suggestions were spot on, for example clean the vents (this should be done once a year, not every seven years and while you are having the vents clean you should also have the furnace cleaned… this recommendation I learned later) They also suggested cleaning the windows and the carpet.
Lesson six: When given advice, think about it both in the short term and the long term and think it all the way through! When we cleaned the carpet, we discovered a stain that was hidden by furniture, our realtors told us not to worry about it, they’d cover it with furniture when staging. This sounded like sound advice at the time but proved not to be the case because when the staging furniture was pulled and the contract (the first one) fell through, the stain was visible and not hard to miss! A similar thing happened when it came to advice about painting the walls. The girls hang out space was painted a bright pink and purple and we were advised to repaint that a more neutral color and so we did. I asked about other walls that were brighter in color, like the laundry room that was bright yellow and Bella’s room that had a wonder black and light pink striped wall, no those were okay, as were the rest of the rooms in the house, or so we were told. This too ended up not being the case. As the duration of time on the market lengthen and our relationship with our realtors started to sour, the painting of the rooms was revisited, and we were advised to repaint the whole house white for a price tag of $6,000… It seems the latest trend now is all neutral walls in either white or gray! We had numerous feedback comments about having too many colors on the walls… Interestingly though, when the price point of the house dropped so too did the concern about the colors… I’m still processing that one. Needless to say, we did not repaint the whole house for $6,000 as we’d already dropped close to $12,000 - $15,000 on other updates and repairs.
Step four: Listing the house
After all the repairs and updates, the house was ready to go on the market. Our realtors put the sign up, in so doing broke the sprinkler line and we had water shooting across our front yard and all over our neighbors’ porch! I should have picked up on this perhaps not being a good omen, but I was too excited that we finally got it on the market, and plus we were frantically moving our remaining possession out and into a lovely two-bedroom apartment that was intended to be for the girls with Andy and I only being there temporarily. This final move took us from 7:30 am in the morning to 12:00 midnight in 100-degree heat no less! That day I really did think we were in hell especially considering the fact the bedrooms in the apartment did not have air conditioning and I’d not had time to pick up fans as the leasing agent had suggested. That night I drug my mattress out to the dining room and under the only ceiling fan in the whole apartment and fell asleep from pure exhaustion. The good news here was, we were out of the house! The next day the carpet cleaners came, the day after that our realtors staged the house. Rather than hiring professional stagers they did it themselves. Not having ever had my house staged before I’d no idea this was perhaps not the best idea.
Lesson seven: If you are going to stage your house, again bite the bullet and pay for a professional stager, it makes all the difference in the world! I learned this lesson much later. So, the house was now ‘staged’, next up the photographer and promotional materials. By this time, it is near the end of July (the 25th of July to be precise).
About this time the Feds started to raise interest rates, and they kept on raising them… with each rate hike, our showings got fewer and fewer… so now the lowering of the price began and it became painfully clear we had missed the boat and our window of opportunity to get maximum dollar for our house was fading, and fading, and fading…. Then we gott an offer! A low-ball offer, one that was offensive (at the time) and so we countered and they countered noting that they knew what the house down the street went for (which was interesting because that house hadn’t closed yet and so the realtor of that house had shared information that was not supposed to be shared which, turned out the not be so great for us…) This went back and forth and eventually; we came to an agreement and the house went under contract.
Lesson eight: Trust your gut when it comes to a buyer especially if you have a bad feeling about said buyer! Sadly, this contract was not to be, and the buyer pulled out after inspection. This proved to be interesting because no inspection report was ever submitted but instead, they implied something was wrong with the foundation… not having done a report and or providing any kind of documentation regarding this we were left without a buyer and a huge concern that something was wrong with our foundation! We took the house off the market and did some research on the foundation. After several conversations with our builders warrantee department, a walk through with them of the property where they found no indication that anything was amiss, and a second inspection with a full report documented and paid for by us (yet another expense incurred with no house sale to show for it), it was determined that our house foundation was perfectly fine and that buyer just used it as an excuse to get out of the contract!
Step five: Changing realtors
After the contract fell through things started to go downhill from there. They had jumped the gun and pulled the staging furniture out before the inspection had occurred so that when the contract fell through, the house was now empty. One thing I did know going into this adventure was that empty houses never sell as fast as houses with furniture in them because for whatever reason a house looks smaller when it is empty. This I learned from the first house we ever sold which if truth be told, our experience with selling our current house was starting to feel a bit like history repeating itself. Our first house in Congress Park also took a long time to sell so much so that our relationship with our realtors for that house went sour (they too had sold us that house… so the similarities of the situation were uncanny). And so… with our faith in them fading we asked to be released from out contract – that did not go well at all. Andy handled the call and to this day he won’t tell me what was said but I got the sense that they went on the attack and that it was most likely directed toward me. Here I will say that when I am passionate about something (and or perhaps in general) I’ve been described as ‘tenacious’, ‘direct’ and ‘intense’ all of which are true and I will own those characteristics 100%. Unfortunately, some people (aka these realtors) don’t or didn’t respond well to those traits… and they wouldn’t let us out of our contract. This was a particularly bad time in this house selling process, our house at this point had been on the market for three months, showings were dropping off, and our price seemed to not be in line with the market. The market itself was changing so fast with all the interest rate increases it was hard to keep up. To make matters worse our relationship with our realtors had hit rock bottom.
Lesson nine: If you take your house off the market, then there is no need for a realtor, especially ones that don’t seem to have your best interest in mind… anymore! As we neared the end of October, which meant our contract with these realtors was almost to an end, the thought occurred to me that if our house was not for sale, then there would be no reason to have our realtors! With this revelation, Andy reached out to them (as they were no longer speaking to me nor I to them) to tell them we wanted to take the house off the market. Contract terminated and the house was off the market, they pulled every single picture, took their sign and that ordeal was finally over. That said, we still had a house to sell, and empty house that we had been paying a mortgage on all these months!
This is where our story takes a turn for the good! Our neighbors had recommended a new realtor to us, Kimberly Austin, as had another friend. So, I reached out to Kimberly, and we hit it off on our first meeting. She too was ‘tenacious’, ‘direct’ and ‘intense’ all of which was channeled into the sole purpose of selling our house! We did a walk through, she told me no we didn’t have to paint the whole house but recommended instead to address portions of specific rooms to neutralize the color palette of the house so that it read as one cohesive color, using the colors that were already on the wall. She confirmed what I already knew in that we needed to stage the house again and we needed to do it professionally, and then she suggested that in addition to the staging we add vision panels/ aka text panels, that helped prospective buyers envision all the possibilities of what the rooms could be – that is what sold me on Kimberly Austin and hiring her as our new realtor. Because the housing market was changing so fast all the old, tried, and true strategies that worked when the market was hot were not working, as was evident from our first realtors marketing strategies. Kimberly was innovative in her thinking and responded creatively to the feedback that we were given…. And it worked! Our house went back on the market, and she had it under contract on the first day. Having been burned by the first offer we were still a little apprehensive and had a few knee jerk moments, but the contract went through, it was a cash offer, not full price but decent, we closed in a two-week time period (two days before Thanksgiving) and finally all was well in the world! The selling of this house was a painful journey but the life lessons I took away from this experience will serve me well as we move onto the next phase of this adventure… purchasing property in Palisade!
Postscript: If you need a good realtor, I highly recommend Kimberly Austin @ Kimberly Austin Properties!
Kimberly Austin/Realtor
Keller Williams Integrity Real Estate
50 South Steele Street, Suite 700
Denver, CO 80209
303.360.6400
Kimberly@AnotherJustSold.com
