Thanks for your response. I would LOVE if you would put the house up on your site. Its a great deal for someone because you can basically buy this house for 250K for the same monthly payment as a 180K house in Lakewood or RR because you don’t pay property taxes.

Here is the deal – we bought it for 244K in 2004. It had a 15 year tax abatement, now that we’ve lived here for 5 years there is 10 years left and its transferable. We have it listed (with a realtor) at $249,900 and are willing to take a loss on it. Here is the site I created for it, the MLS data is on it too.

http://www.kammscornershome.blogspot.com/

I hear you about the clutter – I cleaned and decluttered the house like crazy before we put it up. I called it the Great Purge of 2009. Lots of kids stuff went to Goodwill. My husband works in Beachwood and the commute has just gotten much to hard, and the kids are getting ready to start school. Congrats on your new home!! Thanks so much for your help!

Melissa

Two immediate thoughts come to mind. In the current economy, I’d only list your house if you are willing to sell it at a loss. The second thought is, try to get it on the market before the first-time homebuyer tax credit deadline, which is December 1, 2009…meaning, you’d pretty much have to get it up for sale now. I’ve heard there may be another tax credit next year, but who knows.

If you are ready to sell it now, then get a For Sale By Owner sign up in your yard ASAP (they sell these at Home Depot). I also created a flier and bought one of those flier boxes to hang on the sign out front. You can also list your home for sale for free on http://www.Owners.com as well as http://www.Zillow.com. I’d looks at Zillow to get an idea of how much your home is currently worth, as well as how much other homes in your area have sold for. I was willing to pay the 3.5% commission to the buyer’s realtor, so I made sure to make mention of that in any listing I created. Simply saying “Will work with buyer’s agent” or “Will pay buyer’s agent commission” will suffice. Most realtors won’t take their buyers to a FSBO, but if they know you’re willing to pay them then they are much more likely to. In our case, the buyer’s realtor handled all of the paperwork for both sides, and we were comfortable in doing it this way. We were able to sell our home quickly (had a sign up for about a month), because we listed it at $140,000 after having purchased it for $155,900 six years ago. Neighbors two doors down as well as other friends selling in the area had similar experiences with selling at a loss this year. But, if you are moving in to a larger, more expensive home, as was the case for all of us, then you can expect to save 10-20% on purchasing a larger home, which makes up for the loss on selling you current one.

As for other home sale tips, I painted a lot of the house before putting it up for sale, as well as did some minor decorative things. Unfortunately, the house was at it’s best when we were moving out of it! Another tip is, any time someone comes to see the house, make sure to declutter…I had an empty dresser where I’d stash stuff whenever someone was coming by, because often people will want to come see the house later that day or the following day. I’d stash the toaster oven under the counter in the kitchen to free up counter space, etc. Lastly, if you can, move out about half of your stuff. In other words, if you plan to be moving out anyway, start packing anything you can live without until you move, and get it out of your house. We had stuff stored in the attic and basement, so without having to pack much, we took much of our stuff that was already being stored throughout the house and moved it to our new house as soon as we had the keys. We also put in additional shelves in the basement to get all of our boxes up along the wall and off of the floor. Basically, do whatever you can to make your house look as big as you can.

Hope this helps! Please feel free to send me your for sale info once you’ve decided to sell. I’d be happy to post it here for you!

Best of luck!

Lorelei

This may seem off the wall, but I couldn’t find an e-mail address for you on the site. I currently live in West Park and we are looking to sell our house. i know you sold your house by owner and I was wondering if you had any insight or tips to share from your successful sale. Thanks!

Missy

We haven’t done the Polar Express yet, but from what we could tell riding on CVSR for the Thomas the Train events, there is no difference between cars. My guess is they tell you what cars are available so that if you want to meet up with someone on the train, you can make sure to buy tickets for the same car if you don’t buy the tickets all at once.

Hope this helps!