SELLING THE UGLIEST HOUSE IN THE MIDWEST
In late 2014, while we were selling our Little Canada “Ugly House,” we were also buying our retirement home 50 miles from the Cities. After we closed on that transaction (story to come), the bank’s realtor (it was another foreclosure) wanted to talk to us about that episode in her career. We (thanks, again, to Ms. Parranto-Davis) had manhandled the bank in the buying process and that was a new experience for the bank’s realtor. In that conversation I brought up the difficulties we were having selling our old house.
At the time I was still trying to do the whole sale-by-owner thing, which she strongly discouraged for several good reasons (mostly the lack of MLS exposure and the buyer’s realtor commission complications). After describing the fact that it was a really old house with a lot of complications and obvious future problems, she advised us to make the place appear to be as maintenance-free and move-in-ready as possible. She said the current generation of younger buyers are terrified of maintenance and will run at the first sign of a place needing work; especially skilled work. She warned us that “too much personality” would prevent most buyers from being able to visualize their possessions and their “personalities” (or lack of) in a home.
Neither of us were willing to bleach (or beige) the whole house in the wild hope that we might make the place acceptable to 99% of prospective buyers, but we went home with different visions of who we were trying to attract. There were parts of the house where we both agreed had “too much personality” and those parts got the whitewashing (see the two living room pictures below, for an example).
One of the most overwhelmingly complicated aspects of that house was the 2 ¼ acres of hilly lakeshore that contained 4 very different gardens, including a vegetable garden that was being crowded out by a neighbor’s giant cottonwood hanging over more of the garden every year. We were looking at hundreds of hours of constant work to keep that yard looking pristine during the coming spring. I asked, “How do we make 2 ¼ acres look ‘low maintenance?’”
She said that wasn’t a problem. She was confident that the yard and lake will be “part of the dream.” Meaning, those same low-energy, low-skill buyers will imagine the yard will always look the way it does when they first see it; without any more effort from them. I guess that’s an X-gen-to-Millennial thing. To us, the yard maintenance was about 50% of why we wanted to leave along with 25% being the ancient house maintenance and 25% the noise and lake degradation from the freeway and the state’s abuse and neglect of that lake. Even if the initial motivation for moving (that last 25%) could have been solved, we were still 75% tired of the constant house and yard maintenance.
We sold the house in March, which saved us from a LOT of yard work that year. Weirdly, the current “Ugly House” owners bought the place in August and it’s hard to imagine how they could have overlooked all of that yard work. Not only did they miss that cue, they expected one of their neighbors to assume the task of mowing 100+ feet of their front yard! Mowing the backyard was an all-day affair for us and the multiple gardens took almost all of Ms. Days’ time throughout the warm months. Plus, there was always something awful going on with the city, county, and state regarding ongoing abuse of Savage Lake.
We were in the process of downsizing and getting ready to move out of the Little Canada home, so the bank’s realtor advice put us on a path of polishing everything and emptying it out as much as possible. (If you think our decorating is quirky, you’d totally freak out at a lot of our furniture.) We closed on the new house in late October, 2014 and started moving our stuff to the new house almost immediately; spending our first night with most of our furniture moved November 6th. While we were selling the house, the only furniture in the place was a kitchen table for documents and pictures and an air mattress and bedding for us to sleep on weekends while we held open houses all that winter. That stuff was easily hidden away in a built-in drawer in the “office.”
Starting in November, we held open houses in Little Canada almost every weekend. HomeAvenue.com advertised them for us and supplied us with all the support we needed for buyer’s realtor contacts. Ms. Day is a salesperson, by trade and nature, and she loved the house, making that obvious with every showing. As you might expect from the Realtor.com article, most realtors were nervous, at best, about our house, but lots of people who came to our open houses expressed interest. In early 2015, the Great Recession was still depressing house prices somewhat, and just like 1997, Little Canada was recovering more slowly than the rest of the Twin Cities suburbs. As the temperatures warmed, so did the buyers and by February we had three different interested parties. Because we (mostly me) were tired of owning two homes, we took the first solid offer and started the process of dealing with the paperwork.
Almost immediately after signing that contract, one of the other buyers made a slightly higher offer and wanted to be kept in mind if the first sale fell through. And it almost did. They buyers, ignoring my advice, hired a realtor instead of a real estate lawyer, even after finding the house themselves without that kind of “help.” In a typical attempt to appear useful, their realtor started throwing up obstacles, none of which were included in the contract. Since I’d done most of the mechanical work on the house myself, I didn’t have a problem having an electrician look over the wiring and an HVAC guy check out my heating exhaust system, but when their “inspector” insisted that the basement support system be brought to current code we started to back out. Over the 140 years of the house’s existence, previous owners had installed several jack systems to various parts of the basement and the inspector thought they needed to be upgraded along with the basement floor under the supports. Ms. Parranto-Davis reminded the realtor that the house was being sold “as is” and I found a contractor to do the support replacement work for a number I could accept.
The seller’s realtor contacted me and threatened to withdraw the offer, reminding me that “You’re going to be stuck with two house payments if this falls through.”
I reminded him that I owed $14,000 on the Little Canada house and had paid cash for our new home. My loan on the Little Canada house was likely less of a burden than his car payment, at 2.4% interest. Suddenly, after than conversation, our closing date became a reality and when we showed up for the closing, one of the buyers said, “We’re here to say ‘yes’ to everything.” Their realtor spent the meeting hitting on our HomeAvenue.com realtor and contributed absolutely nothing to the transaction. The closing went smoothly and we were back to being a single home family with a decent pile of cash in our pockets.