Terminal Uniqueness
In the past two weeks some forty-eight houses have gone to contract, in all price ranges ($15,500,00, $11,500,000 and on down), in all areas of town. A fixer upper on Doubling Road, asking $1,895,000, went to sealed bids, all over asking price, within five days. Similar battles are raging everywhere. If your house has still not sold it is time to quit deluding yourself and face the hard fact that it is over-priced. There are buyers out there for everything; multiple buyers. It is simply not true that, for instance, no one wants a house in Riverside in the $1.6 range, or in Old Greenwich at $1.9, or the Back Country for $3.5. Buyers are being cautious, and with good reason, because they can’t grossly overpay for something and know that the market will rise 20% in the next year to bail them out. But anything that is priced properly is going. If no one is bidding on your house, it’s because its price is wrong. You say that you don’t want to “give it away” and you don’t have to; there is a buyer for your house. But again (and again and again), if your house has been on the market for months, if fifty prospective buyers have traipsed through it without result, then you’re out of whack with the market and are not competitive with better or lower priced homes. You don’t want to believe it but it was hard to accept that the Tooth Fairy didn’t exist either. Grow up, lower your price and move on.
Building Permits
It’s surprising how many home owners perform work on their house without benefit of permits. Surprising because they aren’t difficult to obtain and their existence when the house is resold makes life a lot smoother. What often happens is that, during the sale process, the buyer’s attorney will check for all open building permits (work for which a permit was given but no final inspection made) and ask for an affidavit from the seller that any work requiring a permit during the seller’s ownership was performed pursuant to such permit. When, as can happen, the owner refuses to sign such a document the two sides reach loggerheads, “take it or leave it” vs. “I’m not buying without a certificate of occupancy”. How is the dispute resolved? It depends on how badly the seller wants to sell and the buyer wants to buy. One can always accept the house as is and, six years after the work was performed, everything (almost everything) becomes legal by operation of law. Or the seller can go over to the town’s Building Department and ask, nicely, if they wouldn’t consider giving him a permit. For the most part, this latter option isn’t too bad, but if wiring must be inspected, or support beams looked at, there’ll be some work to be done. Of course, if the wiring, say, was improperly installed in the first place, that’s a problem. So my advice is, if you’re ready to work on your house, pull a permit. It’s much easier to do it right from the beginning.
Unchained
I hear all sorts of errant nonsense about the big chain Realtors operating in town. “They have secret listings that the smaller firms don’t know about”; “They tap into the international market and bring in (mysterious, one presumes) Europeans”; and so forth. It isn’t so, but here’s one truth about the chains: they can provide lousy service to their clients. For some time now I have noticed that, if I am having trouble showing one of the chain’s listings because of a malfunctioning door lock, for instance, or a missing key, or an agent who simply refuses to return calls requesting an appointment, a call to the firm’s office manager produces exactly zero results. That person generally has no information about the property in question, no means of contacting the listing agent and, quite often no discernable interest in addressing the difficulty. That’s exactly the opposite of what you’ll encounter at any one of the independents in town, whose principals have a very direct stake in serving the firm’s listings. Some of the very best real estate agents in Greenwich work for large chains (mostly as the result of the chain’s swallowing of their former employer) and this passage is not meant to detract from them in the slightest. But I am not impressed with the support they get from their offices.
In the past two weeks some forty-eight houses have gone to contract, in all price ranges ($15,500,00, $11,500,000 and on down), in all areas of town. A fixer upper on Doubling Road, asking $1,895,000, went to sealed bids, all over asking price, within five days. Similar battles are raging everywhere. If your house has still not sold it is time to quit deluding yourself and face the hard fact that it is over-priced. There are buyers out there for everything; multiple buyers. It is simply not true that, for instance, no one wants a house in Riverside in the $1.6 range, or in Old Greenwich at $1.9, or the Back Country for $3.5. Buyers are being cautious, and with good reason, because they can’t grossly overpay for something and know that the market will rise 20% in the next year to bail them out. But anything that is priced properly is going. If no one is bidding on your house, it’s because its price is wrong. You say that you don’t want to “give it away” and you don’t have to; there is a buyer for your house. But again (and again and again), if your house has been on the market for months, if fifty prospective buyers have traipsed through it without result, then you’re out of whack with the market and are not competitive with better or lower priced homes. You don’t want to believe it but it was hard to accept that the Tooth Fairy didn’t exist either. Grow up, lower your price and move on.
Building Permits
It’s surprising how many home owners perform work on their house without benefit of permits. Surprising because they aren’t difficult to obtain and their existence when the house is resold makes life a lot smoother. What often happens is that, during the sale process, the buyer’s attorney will check for all open building permits (work for which a permit was given but no final inspection made) and ask for an affidavit from the seller that any work requiring a permit during the seller’s ownership was performed pursuant to such permit. When, as can happen, the owner refuses to sign such a document the two sides reach loggerheads, “take it or leave it” vs. “I’m not buying without a certificate of occupancy”. How is the dispute resolved? It depends on how badly the seller wants to sell and the buyer wants to buy. One can always accept the house as is and, six years after the work was performed, everything (almost everything) becomes legal by operation of law. Or the seller can go over to the town’s Building Department and ask, nicely, if they wouldn’t consider giving him a permit. For the most part, this latter option isn’t too bad, but if wiring must be inspected, or support beams looked at, there’ll be some work to be done. Of course, if the wiring, say, was improperly installed in the first place, that’s a problem. So my advice is, if you’re ready to work on your house, pull a permit. It’s much easier to do it right from the beginning.
Unchained
I hear all sorts of errant nonsense about the big chain Realtors operating in town. “They have secret listings that the smaller firms don’t know about”; “They tap into the international market and bring in (mysterious, one presumes) Europeans”; and so forth. It isn’t so, but here’s one truth about the chains: they can provide lousy service to their clients. For some time now I have noticed that, if I am having trouble showing one of the chain’s listings because of a malfunctioning door lock, for instance, or a missing key, or an agent who simply refuses to return calls requesting an appointment, a call to the firm’s office manager produces exactly zero results. That person generally has no information about the property in question, no means of contacting the listing agent and, quite often no discernable interest in addressing the difficulty. That’s exactly the opposite of what you’ll encounter at any one of the independents in town, whose principals have a very direct stake in serving the firm’s listings. Some of the very best real estate agents in Greenwich work for large chains (mostly as the result of the chain’s swallowing of their former employer) and this passage is not meant to detract from them in the slightest. But I am not impressed with the support they get from their offices.
posted by Chris Fountain at 10:42 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home