We finally decided to sell our house. 22 offers and $51,000 over asking price later...
My wife and I had said it to each other probably 742 times in the past five years: “Eh, now’s not the best time to try to sell our house, let’s just wait till (fill in the blank with the excuse of the day).“
Finally, this fall, we decided to try to sell the north Charlotte house we’ve been in since we moved to North Carolina in 2006 and buy something roomier.
I have to admit, it makes me chuckle to write those words: “We decided to try to sell our house.”
Why? Because we really didn’t have to try very hard at all.
I’ll skip to the punchline before I set up the joke for you: This week, we closed on the sale of our modest but cozy ranch in suburbia, exactly 30 days after reviewing nearly two dozen offers with our Realtor and settling quickly on an all-cash deal. For $51,000 over asking. The winning bidder also gave us a concession that I didn’t even know was a thing — more on that in a minute.
But just think about it. Imagine, if you are a homeowner, planting a for-sale sign in your front yard and then within hours feeling like the most popular (and richest) kid on your block.
And we’re actually not unique. At all. Especially in Charlotte.
One of the hottest cities around
It’s not new news, the fact that the city is in the throes of a sellers’ market where houses fly into “under-contract” status faster than Cam Newton jerseys are flying back out of closets.
Just as a refresher, though: Charlotte has been among the country’s hottest housing markets for a good while now, having ranked sixth on the hotness scale as determined by the Urban Land Institute’s recently released annual report — one year after landing at fifth on the same list.
Meanwhile, according to a report released last week by the National Association of Realtors, between June 2020 and 2021, properties nationwide stayed on the market for a median period of just one week before going under contract, whereas the previous year it was three weeks.
American homes are now selling faster than at anytime since the NAR started collecting data in 1989.
Here’s what that looked like for us.
Checking all of the boxes
We were in no rush.
We toyed with the idea of building a house and even bid on one lot, but the neighborhood we were most interested in was releasing lots pretty slowly and had a system for bidding on them that was done online and blindly. Since we weren’t in a rush, we weren’t keen on overbidding or overspending if we didn’t have to.
In this market, that’s a losing strategy. So we started paying closer attention to listings for existing homes.
Our list of demands was pretty simple: a couple extra rooms, including either a sun room or a screened-in porch; a bigger and better kitchen; nice floors throughout; and a fenced backyard for the dogs; all on a quieter and less-trafficky street.
Within just a few weeks, we found a beautiful home on a lovely street that checked all of those boxes and then some. Hardwoods throughout, plus four additional rooms — including both a large sun room and a screened-in porch.
Now, we figured getting our hands on the place, in this market, would be about as easy as trying to win “Squid Game.”
But something remarkable happened. Our Realtor advised us to bid below asking, and although the seller rejected our initial offer, they countered with a new price that was still $15,000 under asking. We agreed, then braced for the moment we would find out someone else had offered them more.
That moment never came. It was a calm, cool, collected experience.
I have a theory as to why. Why there was no bidding war, that is. I’ll share it after I tell you about our experience on the sellers’ end of things.
Which was flat-out bonkers.
Rush hour all weekend long
Our listing went live on a Saturday morning in October.
I‘d just set out on a long bike ride with some friends when my phone started blowing a hole in my pocket thanks to automated text messages, generated by Realtors asking to bring their clients to see the house. I had to pull off to the side of the road multiple times to send a “Y” reply and relay the appointment to my wife back home.
Before most people in Charlotte had gotten out of their pajamas, we had accepted 25 requests for showings.
By dinnertime, 20 prospective buyers had tromped through the house and we had three offers, including one that was $31,000 over asking.
And that was the slower of the two days we were on the market.
By 10:30 a.m. Sunday, we were sitting on eight offers. Realtors were wedging into time slots for showings as short as five minutes long, because that’s about all there was left.
My wife and I had settled into an efficient routine of waiting nearby then rushing back to make sure everything inside was still staged exactly the way we wanted. We watched from behind the tinted windows of my SUV, from a cul-de-sac across the street, as people who couldn’t get appointments were walking around our house pressing their faces against the windows to get a glimpse inside, while passersby in cars created traffic jams as they stopped in the middle of the street in front of our house to gawk.
It was as if someone had tweeted that Taylor Swift had decided to hole up inside our house for the day.
At 2:34 p.m., our Realtor texted us to say: “If you get anymore showing requests, please decline.”
In Little League parlance, we were up by more than 10 runs and they were calling it.
Yet late into Sunday, agents continued calling our Realtor, begging her to give them a chance to show it to their clients. And on Monday morning, we were still getting knocks on our door and surprised looks when we answered it to say that the game was over.
After less than 15 hours’ worth of showings, we’d received 22 written offers.
The bidder we went with also agreed to waive all repair work from the jump. Yes, meaning prior to having the results of the home inspection — prior to even having one ordered.
The price is right. Or, is it?
I can’t say with any real certainty why the listing of our now-former house created a feeding frenzy while the the home we moved into this week didn’t seem to appeal to anyone but us.
Who knows? Maybe we missed a giant red flag, and maybe the joke is actually on us.
But I don’t think so.
Consider this: A couple weeks before our house went up for sale, a ranch very similar to ours went on the market two blocks up the street from us. They listed for $52,000 more than we listed for. That house went under contract a couple weeks after ours. Because that sale hasn’t been finalized yet, I don’t know if they got what they were asking for, but we do know that we went under contract in just over two days, while it took them roughly four weeks.
Of course, there are plenty of variables that might have been at play — the home we sold was in a more-affordable price range in the Hampton Place neighborhood near Prosperity Village, it’s a single-story ranch in a neighborhood dominated by two- and three-story homes, and probably other factors that I can’t guess at.
It is interesting, though, that we, as buyers, perceived the home we ended up purchasing as initially overpriced, went in low, and ultimately didn’t face any competition for it.
At the same time, I thought we were listing our home a little low.
It’s something to think about, whether it’s smarter in this market to list low and hope for a bidding war, or wiser to list high and hope someone who absolutely loves it comes along.
I don’t have an answer. I understand roughly as much about setting home prices as I do about Dogecoin.
What I can tell you is that my wife cried when she first learned we had received 22 offers. She was also laughing. It made her look a little nuts.
But I don’t blame her. The whole situation is nuts. I would have laughed and cried at the same time myself, and looked crazy, too ... but I was too busy drawing up plans for the home theater I want to create, weighing options for a dedicated workout room upstairs, and daydreaming about how nice of a pool table to put in the sun room.
We had put off trying to sell our home for so long. Inertia is a powerful force. And yet not once throughout this entire process have we asked each other why we delayed doing this for so many years.
Because it seems like we may have waited exactly the right amount of time.
This story was originally published November 18, 2021 at 1:00 AM.
