WELCOME

Howdy, y’all! I am back from my trip to Denver, where more than eight inches of snow fell the night before I was leaving. I swear, those fat flakes were coming down from everywhere and yet people were just going about their days as though the world weren’t ending. They were running errands and driving around like it was nothing. It’s no exaggeration when I tell you that I was shocked. Even more so when I had no trouble whatsoever getting out of there the next day. I seriously do no know how you real winter people do it.

Anyway, per our poll last week, sounds like everyone’s most interested in my stories with a side of real estate. That’s why today we’re going to talk about the easiest sale I ever made, as well as the hardest and we’ll see if there’s any common threads.

BTW, if you live anywhere it’s not currently 65 degrees and sunny, know that I think you’re some kind of superhero.

STORY TIME WITH GLENNDA

I’ve been very fortunate to have closed hundreds of transactions over the course of my career. While there have been so many memorable deals, a few stick out in my mind. Specifically, the hardest sale and the easiest, although most fall well in the middle of that continuum.

I’m having trouble deciding which of the two hardest ones wins the prize, so I’ll just go ahead and tell y’all about the both. For one, I listed the home of a CEO who was relocating to out of state. The property was just lovely and in a wonderful neighborhood, but the problem was the yard. Every other house in the area had an expansive backyard, important because there were just a ton of kids in the neighborhood. However, due to the topography of this particular place, there wasn’t much outdoor area, which made it a more difficult sale, yet certainly very possible.

I worked solely with the wife, as the husband was busy out of town, getting their new life set up there. Well, I managed to get the family a good offer. All the sellers had to do was to fill out this mandatory community association disclosure as part of their paperwork. Not a big deal. However, the CEO decided he’d just fill out the details from memory, rather than consult his association documents. This resulted in a fine from the HOA as he’d missed a detail.

From the way that man lit into me when the error was discovered, you’d have thought I’d cost him thousands upon thousands of dollars. 

The truth is, he’d cost himself a $200 fine for taking a shortcut and trying to answer from memory.

In the scheme of what was almost a $2M sale, you’d not think $200 was a big deal, but you would be wrong.

On top of that, the closing was scheduled for when I was out of state on vacation. Because I work on a team, I explained that my business partner of twenty years would be there at the closing with them. As I’ve said, my deals are everyone’s deals in the office and vice-versa; we are truly a cohesive unit.

Well, do you know what happened? That man had the nerve to get on the phone with me and say, “I demand you come back here right now.” To which I replied, “That’s not going to happen.” And then after the fact, he complained to the relocation director about me that I’d done a bad job. SMH. Some people will never be happy.

What I learned from this was that the worst transactions always have a common thread—it’s either that the seller is under undue stress or they’re simply mad about stuff that’s entirely outside of my purview. And in almost every case, when it goes wrong, it’s that they didn’t disclose something they should have.

Tied for gold in the Awful Transaction Olympics was a man who’d gotten a little shifty with an insurance payout. His roof had been ruined in a storm and his insurance paid him to replace it. But instead of replacing it, he simply cashed the check and kept those funds, figuring he was moving anyway and that roof would be someone else’s problem. However, the buyer had a VA loan and the VA rejected the sale, saying they’d only provide the financing if the roof were replaced.

Because he didn’t want to miss out on that offer, the seller found a couple of guys at a gas station to put on the new roof. (It’s only a few years later and I would bet you that previous $200 that the “replaced” roof has since slid clean off.) At the closing, the buyer questioned the receipt for the roof, as it looked a little suspect. While it wasn’t actually handwritten on a Burger King napkin, it was close enough to raise some legitimate suspicion.

And do y’all know what happened? When asked, that seller jumped out of his seat so fast that his chair flipped over behind him. He stormed out of the closing and locked himself in the car, mad that his “integrity” had been questioned. To complete the deal, the closing attorneys had to slide the paperwork through a crack in the window because he refused to come back inside.

I swear I could not make this up.

You’d think the worst transactions are where someone dies during the process, but while very sad, that’s not the case. The worst of the worst are always when the client gets caught doing something they weren’t supposed to do associated with the house. They’re always the most angry and it never has anything to do with us. I’m trying to be as self-aware as I can here, and yet I maintain there’s nothing my agents and I could have done differently in either of those two deals. Often when a closing goes off the rails, it’s that someone got their feelings hurt, or they believe they weren’t treated fairly, whether it’s a negotiation or an inspection and they’re just all whacked out.

As for the easiest transaction, hands down it’s a couple that I worked with who’d originally purchased a For Sale By Owner home. When they went to sell it, they hired me. This happened because the couple enjoyed driving around and looking at houses. Well, they spotted one they loved and they told me about it, so I said, “Let’s go look at it.”

They looked at it, they confirmed they loved it, and they said, “We want it and we want to close next week.” And in a ten-day period, they bought and closed on that home and I also sold their listing. Later, on one of their drive-arounds, they spotted another house, and the same exact thing happened. With these two people, I got five transactions out of them, plus I sold homes for their kids and their friends.

The reason I adore this couple so much is that they just have implicit trust in me. Like, anything I tell them to do to get the house ready, they do it without question, and with a high-quality solution. They are just a dream. And when we’d find them a house, they’d do exactly what I suggested while we negotiated. Their faith in me has made every one of their transactions absolutely frictionless.

So I guess I’d say the biggest difference between the easiest sales and the most difficult are the degrees of friction each create.

And with that said, remember, don’t let your sellers sleep on the condition of their roofs!

glenndabaker

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GLENNDAISM

Today’s Words of Wisdom

GLENNDA BAKER & ASSOCIATES

Double Your Pleasure

Y’all know how I feel about a solid brick ranch. I will snap them up every day and twice on Sunday. But what’s so great about this particular brick ranch is that it comes on a double lot.

What can you do with a double lot? Um… twice as much, of course! What about an ADU? What about having plenty of space for active kids and rambunctious pets? What about the square footage needed to create a downright outdoor oasis? The possibilities are limitless… times two!