When you sell a car, you can sell it one of two ways. You can either sell it because you’ve already bought another car, one that you now love very much. When you have a new car, the old car is no longer important. Who could want two cars unless one is a truck and another is a go-fast sports car? Or perhaps if one is a bumbling SUV and the other a sedan, that might be okay. But for this purpose we have one car that’s older and another one that’s newer, and they’re the same sort of car. No one needs two Dodge Intrepids. No one.
And so one is sold. It’s put out at the road with a sign in the window, or it’s put online, with some pictures and a short description: I bought a new Intrepid. This is the old Intrepid. No further explanation would be needed. Everyone would understand. And so, because you have tow Intrepids and one is new, you sell the old one. $4200. You let it sit at the road or online for a few weeks. Someone who doesn’t even own one Intrepid offers you $3500. It’s less than you want, but you sell it because you have two and one is old. This is one of the ways to sell a car.
The other way is to sell a car that you don’t really want to sell. It seems odd, but this sort of sale happens all the time. The car is worth $4500, but you list it for $5900 thinking that if someone is silly enough to buy it, you’ll sell it. And so that car sits and sits but your price stays firm. $5900 OBO. The OBO is only out of habit, because only serial killers write FIRM next on a car window sign. No one bites. No one looks. Your car sits at the road and it rots online, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because you like that car and you’ve decided that it might be nice to have two Intrepids, in case one is in the shop and you have to go out to dinner.
People sell houses in the same manner. They set imagined targets based on once believed values, or based on nothing at all. They wait for someone to call, to drive by, to look in the windows and like what they see. These are the sellers that we’ve become accustomed to, but these are not the sellers that we wish to find. We want to find the seller who has two of the same thing, the seller who genuinely wishes to no longer own one of them. As the market improves and inventory dwindles, this is our charge. We must find the seller who has what we want, yes, but we must find the seller who has decided to sell because she has to, not just because she sort of wants to.
Have a wonderful Easter Weekend.