It is natural for people to have nervous energy when entering a real estate transaction. This is even more pronounced when someone is planning to buy and sell at the same time. There are so many unknowns in real estate, and when you are buying and selling at the same time they get magnified. When our clients want to buy a new house before selling their current one, they always ask “how long will I need to carry both mortgages?”
For one of our recent clients, this was her scariest concern. She lived in a small one-bedroom condo in downtown D.C. and wanted to move to a single family home.
Her lender said she was qualified to purchase her new home prior to selling and paying off her existing mortgage on her condo. Even though the lender said she could afford it, the thought of paying two mortgages for longer than 60 days created a lot of anxiety. We needed to come up with a plan to make sure this didn’t happen.
We faced two challenges in making sure that she got her home sold within her 60 day timeframe. The first challenge was that units in her condo building had an erratic sales history. This made it difficult for us to determine a good list price and to estimate how many days it would take to sell.
To solve this problem we worked backwards from her 60 day timeframe. We knew that it would take 30 days from the day that she accepted an offer to get to settlement. Therefore, we only had 30 days remaining to get her condo under contract.
In her building, many of the units took 40 days to sell, so we had to make sure we nailed the pricing. We helped her pick an aggressive price that we thought would sell within 20 days. If that didn’t work, we were prepared to strategically reduce the price on the 20th day to a price that we were highly confident would get the condo sold in the next 10 days.
Our second challenge was that she had totally outgrown her space. There was way too much furniture and personal belongings inside her unit making it difficult to show its best. Our strategy was to get her home “market ready” so that when it was time to sell it could go live on the MLS fast.
Our marketing and design team worked with her to help select what furniture should remain in the house to help present the home at its best.
All the advance marketing and preparation work we did paid off. We were able to get her condo on the market the very next day.
We knew showings would be slow in her building, and it took a week to get the first showing. That was a stressful week. However, they loved it and made a full priced offer. We were able to get her condo sold and the mortgage paid off well ahead of her 60 day time frame.
Every client we work with has their own unique perspective and situation. Our job is to help them map out a path to a successful transaction. Whether it’s calculating the time it will take to sell, getting their home market ready, or finding the perfect new place to call home, our goal is to always make sure Good Things Happen.
