Recently I closed escrow on 88 Wallace Way in San Rafael. The property needed a lot of work, and when it became vacant in the middle of September we really didn’t have much time to get it ready for the market. We could have taken a week to refinish the flooring, another week to have the interior painted, and another week to get the property staged, professionally photographed and on the market. That would have put us well into October with the countdown to the typical holiday slowdown giving us almost no time to implement a price reduction strategy, if necessary.
We decided to take a chance and simply sell the property in it’s vacant and ‘as is’ condition. We listed the property attractively low at $999,000 in order to generate activity and hopefully multiple offers. I had a CAMO, and one of the agents who came through made a pre-emptive offer less than 5% over the asking price which we ended up declining. Another agent with a prospective buyer was also indicating they were interested in making an offer.
With all that activity we decided to expose it to the wider market. I had a Thursday broker’s open, then it was open over the first weekend. On Tuesday when we decided to look at offers we received six very competitive bids, with the winning offer going 15% over our asking price. This was a winning strategy.
The moral of this story is, there is a market for fixers. If you’ve got a property that needs a lot of work, now is a great time to sell. Flippers will want to get in there, do the work, and put the house back on the market this spring. Timing is everything.