We have a seller who has reduced his price. He had an accident and wishes to unload the property asap. It is always difficult to give advice in situations such as this and is evenmore so in the current economic conditions. Though making a quick buck is nice, usually I prefer to have more time and do the job right, getting as much for the seller as the market will bear. What is my usual advice? I use the words "fire sale price". That makes them stop and think about how urgent their need is and also connotes what may be necessary to get a sale in the time frame that they want.  It is especially frustrating when they want top price AND a quick sale. I am given nothing to work with.

In the current case, the property has been for sale , off and on, mostly on, for quite a while. The price has always been a bit too high. He will ask my recommendation. I will tell him the most that I think he can get for it, in a best-case scenario, and then he will price it a few thousand higher. Meanwhile, he has slowly been working on a complete rehab of the home. Not the way I would want to see it done; he has his own ideas. This is an old home and I prefer to see them restored rather than modernized. The thought here is that nearly everyone likes a properly restored old home but one that's been just remodeled (modernized) will turn off the old home folks. So what was done? First, he removed the back section to the home, saying that it was unfixable. I didn't think so, but, to be fair, I did not study it like he did. The amputation changed the home from larger to modest sized and most of my customers like old homes, and the larger, the better. Secondly, he changed the upstairs from a boring 4 modest-sized rooms circling around a hallway to the same rooms but with cathedral ceilings, hardly appropriate for an eyebrow colonial. They are almost as high as they are wide. With out brutal winters here, cathedral ceilings are not sought-after either among folks who like to cut heating costs. The home has been remodeled in the past, so not too many of the old features were left. What were left are gone now, however.

But it is definitely nicer than it was and although it is not what I would have recomended, it  is a signifacant improvement and will be easier to sell than it was when he bought it.  I have noticed that the people from Romantic backgrounds (Italian, Hispanic, etc.) are more apt to do away with old features and make something old look more modern. Yes, the owner fits in that pattern.  Meanwhile, the seller has had an accident, was seriously injured, and will remain disabled as a result. He lost his job along the way. He wants it gone.  My advice to him is below.

   "Honestly, in this market, I don't know. That is not to say I don't have intelligent guesses. I have been in real estate since 1981 and have seen lots of ups and downs. This one seems very different. The people that I see the most of are expecting to get something either for little or nothing or else they have little or nothing to put down. In the past, when the stock market has been down, I have seen a better quality of customer emerge, folks with money who don't want it in stocks. Not this time.

    In general, a stock answer for a quick sale can be addressed by telling someone to lower the price. that still works and always will. At the 'right' price, there is always a buyer for everything. But determining what is right is the hard part, without going too low and netting the client too little. You have just taken steps to address that, with the lowered price. Will it be enough? My thought is 'yes', but the market will tell us in due time if that is correct. I can't be sure. This round, there have been a few things selling at what we think was fair and encouraging prices. But others, priced cheaper, have languished. In Schoharie County, for which we receive records of all sales, sales have been just 1/3 of normal - that includes the family sales, stuff transferred by wills and all non arm's length transactions as well. Acreage has been the worse of all. Even less is selling and prices are all over the board. All I have sold this year is one piece, priced at $3000/acre - and that was to a neighbor. The general public did not even look at it. The seller has no idea just how lucky he was there. We had another piece that had a few buildings (garage, storage, apartment), a killer location, and was priced at not too much over $1000/acre. That saw a fairly good response. Its only drawback was that there was a large wetland on the land. But there were well over 100 acres, too. The people who wanted it all made lowball offers, all but one guy who refused to follow through on getting the financing. Eventually one of the lowball offers was high enough to tempt the owner and the place sold.

Don't interpret this to mean that your acreage will see the same effect. Yours is different as it is a 'farm', land which supports buildings. The remaining land, should you choose to sell it afterwards, might be treated the same as the examples I gave in the previous paragraph.  Your price of $1600/acre is, coincidentally, exactly the maximum that the Federal Land Bank system will presently loan on land. Your land is not quite in the state of cultivation that the FLB would like to see for their maximum, but it is not that far off either.

So, right now, there is quite an abnormal range of what is being sold (and a much larger range of what isn't). To stand out form the crowd, you need to be priced lower. I think you are. I know very little that is in this price range that compares. that is good for you. But the market will tell us, and that takes some time. Let's re-evaluate things every 30 days.

The other side of the equation, besides price, is condition. You are pecking away at that and have come a very long way. But it is still a work in progress. If it was finished, your  chances would increase dramatically. I understand that you have constraints of time and money to deal with which may prevent that form happening. If so, we will deal with it as we must....  The barns are visibly deteriorating, which would bother me as a buyer, but I don't think it will bother too many others. The guy this weekend didn't seem to notice or to care if he did, and he went all through them....  Where the barn condition may come into play is someone trying to use that as leverage to justify a lower offer.  I have ways of dealing with such things, ways that are never always successful but work well with some buyers."

Now the ball is in our hands. We finally have a price we can work with. The rest will be a test of our marketing ability and my showing skill. There are two major functions at work here - price and marketing skill, coupled with some luck.