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The Science Behind the Sale
Time To Wait LaDoris and Steven Puryear needed four months to sell their house in Springfield, but they were in no hurry and got the original list price.
(Buyer's Advantage)
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"The neighbors sold their house in December in one week," said Sittnick, who works for Tax Analysts, a nonprofit publisher. "But I put my townhouse on the market the first week in January, and it sat for a few weeks with no serious offers. It felt like a long time to me, though it wasn't."
A contract came in at $350,000 in February, and settlement was March 7.
"It cost me money to sell the house," Sittnick said. She bought it at the height of the market, just 2 1/2 years ago.
But she never loved the place. And she had a compelling reason to sell -- she had found a new home in an "active adult" community that was a great deal. Builder Del Webb had dropped the price from $470,000 to $384,500 and offered to pay six months of the first mortgage.
Because Sittnick responded quickly to the sluggish market by adjusting her price, there was just one month where she had to pay two mortgages -- the second mortgage on the new house and the mortgage on the townhouse.
Her agent, Kathy Colville of Long & Foster in Sterling, said Sittnick also did her homework before listing. She replaced a wall that she had taken down to combine two of the three bedrooms into a larger space. And she agreed to have the house repainted. The house was empty, though, which is a turnoff for some shoppers who have trouble imagining a lived-in house.
Sittnick said she wasn't comfortable with the idea of buying before selling. "It was a gamble, and I'm not a gambling person. But Kathy took me by the hand and led me along. . . . And because Del Webb had agreed to pay the first mortgage for six months, I could afford to take the risk."
She said, "Now, I'm able to live in a brand-new house for the first time in my life."
'Chasing the Market Down'
It took real estate agent Vicki Salton 234 days to sell one Ashburn house, even though it "showed very nicely and was very well taken care of."
The slowdown? "It did not have a lot of upgrades. And that's what buyers in today's market are looking for," said Salton, of the Polaris Group at Century 21 Redwood Realty in Ashburn. The nine-year-old house was listed last summer "just as the market changed," Salton said. The listing price was $689,000. It finally sold at $575,000 in February and went to settlement March 5.
The house had a "gourmet kitchen," for instance, but the countertops were laminate, not granite, and the floor was linoleum, not tile.
The owners considered remodeling but decided that it could cost several thousand dollars and a buyer "might not like what they did," Salton said. Instead, they got estimates on remodeling costs and adjusted the price.
