This week I closed escrow on my listing at 184 Baypoint Dr in San Rafael, which was a good thing. The market in Baypoint Lagoon has been really tough, with lots of competition among sellers and few motivated buyers. It took us a lot of patience, some intense negotiations, and 104 days on the market. I’m grateful we got it done, especially because recently I’ve had some situations not work out.
I don’t work with a lot of buyers. Typically, it’s just friends, family and referrals. Sometimes I’ll work with people who get my newsletter or read my blog, but mostly I represent sellers. Two weeks ago, I had a buyer call me on one of my condo listings. I took him to see it and he asked to preview a few other properties. One of them he liked a lot and we ended up making a good offer on it. The situation was highly competitive, and we were able to get our offer accepted. Everything came together, until it fell apart when he had to back out of the deal for personal reasons. Hopefully he’ll look me up again when he has things sorted out.
This week another buyer who is family made an offer on a small, beat-up house in San Rafael. We were close with our initial offer, but the sellers asked everyone to resubmit and even though we came up in price we still got beat out by a buyer who paid significantly more. That can happen, which is one of the main reasons my history is mostly working with sellers. In this market however, where buyers have a little more power, I've become more inclined to represent buyers.
This week I also missed out on getting a listing. It wasn’t a big one, just another San Rafael fixer-upper. But I think there’s a market for those homes right now, so representing a seller in those situations is more likely to lead to a paycheck than representing a buyer. Anyway, it was a divorce situation which went to mediation. One seller wanted to use me, the other wanted to use a Realtor who lived beyond Sacramento. They went to mediation and the mediator decided it was better to make neither of the parties happy and assigned a ‘Bay Area’ agent who neither had ever met. I specialize in San Rafael so I thought I’d be the logical choice, but that’s just the way my cookie got crushed.
Lastly, a home recently came on the market in San Rafael. I spoke with the sellers over the winter and knew they were going to talk to other agents. The house was in deplorable shape. Tenants had left it in shambles and was literally a health hazard. My advice was to sell it ‘as is’ in the spring, unless they wanted to spend several months and a few hundred thousand on it and take their chances on the fall market. They didn’t take my advice and they hired someone else after doing a pretty extensive remodel. I don’t know how much money they spent. I don’t know what they will get, but unless it gets overbid, which I think is unlikely, I still think they would have been better off taking my advice.
Anyway, I’m glad I closed escrow on Baypoint. After Labor Day things should get better. The market usually does, but nothing seems to follow familiar scripts anymore.