Over at the Housing Bubble Blog, I’m seeing more and more stories like this: Boston Globe: After having her home on the market for nearly a year, with about 30 showings, multiple price drops, and only one not-so-tempting offer, Phyllis Troia decided to try something different. She put her Dutch colonial in Plymouth up for auction. ‘It’s marketing out of the box,’ said Troia.”
“‘I had to take my destiny into my own hands,’ Troia said, because, ‘the only solution my realtor came up with was to undersell my house. This, she added , is a wake-up call to the real estate industry.’”
“After the weekend, there were nine bidders. But in the end, she was not satisfied with the final two bids, and exercised her right to close the bidding. She’s now moved on to a for-sale-by-owner model.”
“Troia’s efforts reflect the frustration of home sellers in the region. There are nearly 1,000 more single-family homes for sale on the South Shore than there were a year ago at this time.”
“Troia, however, is happy she is taking the go-it-alone route to get what she thinks her house is worth. ‘This is a great house,’ she said over and over, as people meandered through during her recent open house. ‘We’ll see what happens,’ she said. ‘I have too much invested to walk away with a minimal amount of money.’”
Note the absurdity that this buyer thinks she is entitled to a particular price she may have been able to receive at the height of the bubble last year. The fact that neither her agent nor an auction could get her that price leaves her undeterred. Note also that despite the recent small downturn housing prices in the Boston area have still more than doubled in the last six years. Yet the seller somehow thinks that selling her home for more than double what she could have received six years ago would be “underselling” her house. Incomes and overall prices, of course, haven’t even come close to doubling. You now, folks who sold Cisco at 60 in mid-2000, having lost 1/4 of their paper (and speculative) profits, turned out to be pretty smart.
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