You Can’t Always Get What You Want

My favorite band for quite some time now has been The Rolling Stones.  I tend to listen to their music every single day.  My favorite song is “Honkey Tonk Women”, I love that song!  

As you may remember, we put our home on the market about three weeks ago.  When we put our home on the market we were certain because our neighbor had sold their home within an hour of listing for a staggering number.  If I am being honest it just shocked me what they got and that was what motivated me and my wife to try to put our home on the market and get a crazy number as well. 

My wife and I sat down together and said that this is what it would take for us to move and do this. During this planning, we of course had to find out where we were going to go next.  We found the perfect place.  We were going to build our dream home with our dream backyard. But the only way all of this was going to make sense, was for us to get this crazy list price.

Well, we are both very impatient and we also both really…really…really love our current home.  So we weren’t as motivated as we needed to be to pull this off. Fast forward to day six of being on the market.  We broke our promise and reduced our home by $100,000.  That just deflated us, it broke our spirits.  The market is slowing down. So what that did was put us into a position of not believing it was going to happen.  Three days later we finally gave up and said, "We are just going to stay here.”

When I made that decision the first thing I thought about was this - that you just can’t always get what you want.  Right now we are seeing a lot of home sellers trying to get what they want, but the market has stopped giving.  The buyers have decided to not give sellers what they want anymore.  Now what we are seeing is that when homes are listed correctly, when they are at the correct price, the homes are going just as quickly as they ever were.  Just like the home across the street.  The market found a lot more value in that home than they did ours.

So if you are someone wanting to sell there is one huge tip I am going to give you.  Quit looking at the past sales, quit identifying the last three comparable sales to your home.  As we shift from a seller’s market to this neutral market we are going to have buyer’s options that have grown.  That means buyers can identify or look at more homes and they are slower in their decision-making.  So what you gotta do now sellers is shift from the past sales, to placing your eyes on how many homes are on the market that you are competing against.  How many homes are selling per month that are just like yours?  How many homes are coming on the market that is just like yours?

Sellers, you are going to find out that now you are going to have to be the best-priced and the best-looking home to sell.  If you are not your home will just sit or it will just come off the market.  Home sellers, you can’t always get what you want…but you could up until now!