I Don’t Want Your Money

A few weekends ago I was running an open house in West Hartford. The traffic was pretty steady and most people seemed to react positively to the home. About a half hour in, a buyer came up to me and asked me if they could give me money to hold the house for them. Excuse me? A deposit. They wondered if they could give me a deposit to hold the house for them. There seemed

Try, Try Again

Have you ever submitted an offer and had the seller say “Thanks for the offer. Would you like to try again?” I’ve delivered this response as the seller’s agent, as well as received this response as a buyer’s agent. It’s really not a lot of fun to be delivering or receiving this response. If you’re the seller’s agent, it means that someone most likely submitted a low ball offer. Your seller client got excited that

Is the Price Negotiable?

Yesterday I hosted an open house at one of our listings. At least 3 of the visitors asked me if the price was negotiable. My advice to buyers is always: If you’re a serious buyer and interested in a house, put in an offer. If you don’t think the house is worth the asking price, offer something lower. You’ll never know how negotiable the sellers are unless you put in that first offer. That’s the

100 Years of Inflation

As part of our home’s 100 year birthday celebration, we learned that the original cost to build the structure in 1911 was $8,000. Starting with that data point, I tried to do some figurin’ to see how much that is in today’s dollars. Doing the calculation in my head was a very bad idea. Without actually thinking about it very much, I jumped to the conclusion that the $8,000 was “like a million bucks” in

Such a Nice Family

This weekend I received a voicemail from an agent telling me that they just emailed me an offer for one of my listings. They also asked that I give them a follow up call so that they could tell me a little more about their buyers. I went to my email and reviewed the offer before calling them back to see if I had any questions about the offer. I didn’t, everything seemed pretty standard.