Selling the house - Realtor Phase

This past Friday we had an open house for local Realtors.  This was our third open house and, like the two before, no one showed up.  Since no Realtors came, we had a lot of food and wine for us to chow down on.  The beer and food we mostly gave to Patty's son as a care package for which he was most grateful.  This open house pretty well made up our minds to end the "Sell by Owner" Phase and to start the Realtor Phase if we want to sell the house in this market.  Seems that since it is a buyers market, the Realtors hold all of the cards in this game.

It really was fate that got us together with the Realtors we chose. We had already decided on one of the Realtors that had come to the house after seeing our ad and made an appointment with her for Monday. However, Patty and I decided to walk to a bar/restaurant about half a mile from our house to have dinner and watch the live entertainment.  At the bar, a couple of guys sat down next to us and we started to talk.  One of them just couldn't get over how much I looked like his brother.  This started the conversation that led to us asking what they did for a living.  They replied that they are in real estate to which we replied that we are trying to get out of real estate :-). So after much laughing and some serious talk, we made an appointment for this morning, Sunday, to see if we were both a good fit to work together on selling our house.

Well, we were sold on these two guys as Realtor's.  Hopefully they are the same positive go-getters with potential buyers as they were with us as potential listing sellers.  They spent a little over two hours with us and we were signed up as their clients and canceled the appointment with the other Realtor.  Within 3 hours we were listed on the MLS with pictures and had a lock box on the door and a potential buyer to look at the house next week!  We also lowered our asking price by 10% which we already knew we should be doing anyway.

We are still well on track with our plan for full-timing this year and, just maybe, by summer!