The housing market used to be so hot that buyers began writing offers before real estate agents even entered a new listing. And then agents advised buyers to improve their bids by writing personal letters to the seller, explaining where they planned to put the nursery and gushing over the owner’s wonderful taste in decor.
Now with last month’s real estate listings up by 23 percent since the same time last year, Twin Cities sellers might want to try writing a personalized letter of their own:
“Dear Buyer: Make us an offer. Puh-leese.”
The long-predicted real estate bubble hasn’t proved out, but you can tell by the number of “For Sale” signs on your block that the tide has definitely turned. Cable television channels, once overcrowded with programs showing how to sponge paint your walls to resemble a Tuscan villa, now are teeming with programs like “Designed to Sell,” “Sell This House” and the ever more desperate “Buy Me.”
In all of these programs, sellers are advised to paint over their sponged Tuscan walls with something inoffensive that buyers will like. Not that anyone really knows what buyers want, there being more than 26,000 homes for them to choose from in the Twin Cities — a record high.
I recently sold a house that was on the market almost a year, the scarring details of which I will save for a therapist’s couch, a cathartic novel and, one hopes, a personal invitation from Oprah. One of the few consolations of this unfortunate episode was the support I found from other sellers in the same situation, who have been equally appalled at how many people will walk into an open house just to use the toilet or to see if there’s something good in the fridge.
What we all can agree on is that buyers are clearly enjoying their buying power these days. But they should also be careful that their behavior on this side of the transaction doesn’t come back to haunt them when it’s their turn to sell.
Consider the neighbor I know, trying to sell a house that is home to three small children. Each call from the realty office begins a 30-minute anaerobic sprint in which she must dust bust every Froot Loop, scrub the toilets, artfully arrange the pillows and throws, blast scented air freshener over the cat box and hustle her entire brood down the street to another neighbor’s house, where she sits, panting, with fingers crossed. After performing this drill recently, the buyer stayed less than five minutes and complained through his agent that her house didn’t have a fireplace.
“It says right there on the page that it doesn’t have a fireplace,” she told me, fuming. “Did they have to double-check themselves? Do they think that’s funny?”
Similarly frustrating to sellers is the current trend for “staging” a home, creating a kind of still life of single-family living with none of the books or personal knick-knacks but a constant supply of fresh flowers, scented candles and other gimcrack no real family could stand for five minutes. Buyers have become so accustomed to these faux tableaux — the angled couch, the arranged tea service with cozy, cashmere throw — they seem not to notice the actual architecture surrounding it.
“Now I’m getting agents who come through and say their clients thought the coffee table wasn’t quite right for the space,” said one acquaintance, who has been bringing fresh bouquets to her home since last June. “The coffee table is not for sale. The living room is.”
Sellers who’ve had homes on the market a few months notice that today’s buyers are remarkably indecisive and may come to visit a house several times, sometimes leaving behind fast-food wrappers and reading material. One guy I know got a bid from a buyer who spent so much time in his house that the offer included a list of the owner’s furniture, identified by manufacturer.
“The only way they would know where the dining room table came from is if they crawled underneath it,” he said. “How do you know where the bed is from unless you’ve practically slept in it?”
Other sellers complain of being pestered by annoying questions from buyers who aren’t that interested anyway. Where is the screen for the storm door? How come the board on the landing creaks a little? How come the family room doesn’t have surround sound? Would the seller be willing to install surround sound? Would you throw in central air, too?
The effect is wearying for sellers, who often wonder if buyers realize that the house whose bones they are inspecting is a flesh-and-blood home as well — a place where tears were shed and dreams were hatched, where holidays were celebrated and babies brought straight from the hospital. This does not mean buyers are required to pay the asking price. But they should pay some respect.
The first rule of real estate is, “Location, location, location.”
The second rule of real estate is less well known: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
***I like the second rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Homeowners, in large part, have been acting like complete asses to the buyers/non-homeowners. The author is right, “what goes around comes around”; however, she failed to realize that the sellers are and will be getting their “come-up’ns”!!!
Stu, you nailed it. The current wave of homeowners have a huge sense on entitlement which seems to start at first uptick of values. It reminds me a lot of the posturing in the stock market in late 90’s. It’s easy to feel like a genius when everything you buy goes up, even easier to dispense advise.
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