People have been writing to ask me how we sold so quick in a market like this. Okay, we didn’t actually sell our home in 30 days. We put it on the market for a few weeks in November, and quickly realized that it’s not a great time to sell when the market is falling 300 points every day and people are talking about the next Great Depression. We took the holidays off, and went back on the market in February. Things had calmed down a little by that point.
Obviously, though, that was not the best time to sell an apartment in Manhattan, not in a market that’s probably going to show a significant transactional and pricing decline in the second quarter. But once we put it back on the market, we had an acceptable offer in about a month, in contract a few weeks after that.
How did we do it? Well, we had some advantages that maybe you don’t have. Like, my wife is a real estate agent here in the city. And I own a real estate company out in the suburbs. Chances are your wife probably isn’t a real estate agent, and you’re not a real estate professional.
But don’t worry. That’s now why we sold quickly. The only reason those “advantages” actually helped us is that we actually listened to our own advice. What for years she’s been telling her sellers, and I’ve been telling my agents, we actually did.
As in:
1. If you’re moving, start now.
We started the moving process about a month before we actually put the apartment on the market. As in, we actually started moving. We spent about three weekends clearing out the apartment, taking out about boxes and boxes of assorted stuff we had filling the place. Some of it we kept and stored upstate, some it we threw away, some of it we gave away. But we took out about fifteen boxes of stuff: books we don’t read, clothes we don’t wear (or no longer fit into), food we don’t, furniture we don’t need to sit on. Emptied the place out, made it look a lot bigger, nicer, cleaner. And we were planning on moving, which is why we were selling the apartment in the first place, so it helped us get a head start and make the final move a little less intensive.
We also hired a guy to come in and do all the little things that had degraded in the apartment since we did construction in 2005. Everything from lighting fixtures that never got installed and were sitting in a closet to smudges on walls. $2,000 later, the place looked like it did when we moved in.
2. Be Accessible
We wanted the place shown as much as possible, whenever someone wanted. You want to come over on Sunday morning? Come on down! Wednesday night! What time? We did open houses almost every weekend it was on the market. Every morning, we’d clean it up, put the dirty clothes in a hamper and hide it away. It was ready for show anytime an agent wanted.
3. Price to Sell
We priced aggressively for the market, underneath other apartments that were for sale in the area. We knew that the market might be tough, so we wanted to strike quickly. If we’d sold a year ago, we probably would have gotten over $1,300 a square foot. We priced at $1,200 a square foot and sold for about $1,100 a square foot. We didn’t get the best price possible, and maybe if we’d waited out the spring market we could have done a little better, but we got good terms and a good, trustworthy buyer and we had our money off the table. Even now, I’m seeing comparable apartments that were for sale when we put our place back on the market in February, and they’re still priced above what we sold for.
Would that work for everyone? I don’t know. But when I was buying I looked at a lot of apartments that had clothes stuffed in the closets, or were dirty, or smelled like cats, or were only available for show on alternate Wednesday afternoons. So I think it helped.
It also helped, of course, that I had a great agent. I highly recommend her.
