If you are old enough to remember the ABC’s Wild World of Sports introduction, then you know where the phrase, “The thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat,” comes from. The intro continues, “The human drama of athletic competition.” Exchange the word ‘athletic’ with ‘real estate’, and you’ve fair portrayal of the real estate market in Marin County and Bay Area.
Instead of a ski jumper crashing and careening down and over the ramp, you could have a buyer tearing out his or her hair after repeatedly not getting their offers accepted. The thrill of victory? Those are the joyful jumps of stakeholders all around when a deed is recorded. From the outside looking in, if you’ve never been in a real estate transaction, you might not think that the process of buying and selling real estate is so dramatic.
Think again! Consider the buyers who have been waiting years to purchase a home, getting outbid multiple times, or never even finding ‘the one’ to bid on. There’s a lot of emotion that goes into making a decision to buy a house. Getting an offer turned down can be devastating. Getting repeatedly denied will take its toll on even the most hardened souls. After the Great Recession market crash, I had a buyer who made 16 offers on properties before finally getting one accepted. 16! That’s a lot of agony. This was an investor who finally got wise and started writing competitive offers, eventually ending up with 5 properties. Those victory thrills set up his retirement income.
I recently sold 656 Bamboo Terrace in Terra Linda and we received three offers on the property, in a competitive process going $76,000 over our asking price. For the spring sale, my sellers started preparing the property for the market in October. Their efforts over a six-month period preparing the home and getting all their permits in place paid off in a big way. You can imagine their elation once the escrow closed!
Like so many people from my generation, the thrill of victory and agony of defeat is a phrase that has been tattooed on my brain since I was a child. That was literally back in the dark ages, when there were only 3 television stations. My brother and I used to listen to ‘Mystery Theatre’ every night on the radio after saying our prayers. The internet was still decades away. Communicators on Star Trek reruns were a vision of smart phones in the future. I might be old, but I still get excited about the prospect of the thrill of victory every time I put pen to paper for a client.