Six Pointers for the Heartsick Home Seller

The couple lived in a small palace--a 4,000-square-foot house with all the extras: five bathrooms, a three-car garage and an impressive pool.

Yet there was a crack in the supposed affluence of this picture. Few clothes hung in the walk-in closets. The pantry was growing bare. Worse, the couple had ceased making house payments.

“I was surprised to find out they were facing foreclosure,” recalled Dorothea Deetz, the Re/Max Realty agent who had taken the couple’s listing. The man’s entrepreneurial venture had failed. And the wife’s salary wouldn’t stretch to cover the bills.

Rather than reveal their predicament to Deetz, the couple said nothing and kept demanding that the house be offered at $50,000 over its true market value, hoping for some miracle that would spare them the need to sell.

But the strategy backfired. After nine months of playing at the selling game, the couple lost their dream home to foreclosure. Rather than walking away with their equity, they were forced to leave with no cash and ruined credit.

Are you a heartsick seller who must liquidate against your will due to financial problems, divorce, health issues or another untoward circumstance?

Then it’s often better to price your home a peg below the market instead of holding out for a heftier price until you’re so desperate you must sell low or see your home snatched away from you.

Assuming a sale is necessary, it’s often better to hasten than to slow the process, said Gwen Boyd, an agent for Keller Williams Realty, a new national realty chain.

To sell promptly--within 30 to 45 days or less--Boyd recommends that you price your property 5% below similar homes that have sold within the last year. Then advertise to the world, “This is the deal you’ve been looking for.”

Agents and buyers alike will actively seek out a below-market home even if it’s only a notch below market. And if you unload your home before panic sets in, you’re in a much better negotiating position, Boyd said.

“You might as well bite the bullet,” agreed Al Konovalski, an agent for the Coldwell Banker chain.

Pricing a peg below market is one pointer for those who must sell involuntarily. Here are others:

* Try to keep your emotions out of the transaction.

“You’ve got to wean yourself away from your emotional attachment to the home,” Konovalski said.

Compelled to sell against their will, most sellers face an array of grief reactions, from anger to self-pity. Others find themselves in a state of outright denial, which can lead to indecision and, ultimately, a loss of choices.

While such emotions are perfectly normal and understandable, letting them infiltrate the selling process is counter to your self-interest, Boyd said.

She and other experienced agents say self-sabotage is not uncommon by those involved in selling a home after a divorce. Often a divorce decree that requires liquidation of the family home will allow one spouse to stay in the house--with the other making payments--as long as the property is up for sale, Boyd said.

In hopes of hanging onto the house, a spouse might impede showings, claiming they are inconvenient, for instance. But after a prolonged period, in which the house languishes on the market, the other partner in such a situation could well become frustrated and push to “dump” the property at any price, Boyd said. That could hurt both sides.

* Be careful about renting the house to gain an emotional “buffer zone.”

Faced with the need to sell, some tenacious owners try to hang on to a home by converting it to a temporary rental, thereby postponing the inevitable and giving their emotions time to heal.

But such a plan is usually a poor idea, unless the home is appreciating or you have good reason to think your good luck will return and you can move back later. Otherwise you may still need to sell down the road under tougher circumstances.

The presence of tenants in a home can make it more difficult to sell at a good price, Konovalski cautioned. That’s because tenants are often careless with a home.

“Chances are, a year from now you’ll have to go in there and redecorate to take care of all the places where the tenants nicked the paint or kicked the doors,” he said.

* Find an agent with whom you have a good rapport.

Granted, an agent is not a therapist hired to deal with your emotional distress. Still, a homeowner going through an unhappy transition is entitled to an agent who is compassionate, said Deetz, the Re/Max agent.

“It’s really important to find someone with whom you can open up who will be a nonjudgmental listener,” she said.

How do you know whom to select? Ask those you trust--including neighbors, friends and workplace associates--for references. And then select an agent who is interested enough to ask you plenty of questions about your current needs and plans, Deetz said.

* Disappear when your home is shown for sale.

It’s almost always unwise for the owners to be present when a home is shown to prospects since buyers will tend to be inhibited in their exploration of the property. But the need to disappear is all the greater when the sale is unwanted.

The reason is that during an emotional crisis, you’ll be especially vulnerable to the off-handed comments of perfect strangers about the place you call “home.”

“Why put yourself through this unnecessary pain?” Deetz asked.

* Put yourself in “forward” rather than “reverse.”

For many, the involuntary departure from a home means closing the door on bittersweet memories that span the years. It will probably also mean moving to humbler quarters.

But just because you’re downshifting doesn’t mean there aren’t positives to be found in your new situation--if you go out and actively pursue them, says Boyd of Keller Williams.

“Go out and shop for the best possible place to move and then start focusing on the positive,” Boyd said. “Don’t be a defeatist.”

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Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.