This house is “The Worst!” How to deal with lousy feedback on your home

This house was just ranked the worst by an agent who did a showing. I'm going to explain why I'm not worried. Plus the important lessons in lousy feedback for your home. So let's take a quick look at the feedback we received. First things first, I do appreciate the agent taking the time to show this home and to provide feedback. Not all agents have the courtesy to do that. So number one, is your client interested in this listing? Not interested. That's fine. I get it. The property is not for everybody. Number two, how is the overall experience? It was fair. OK, that's not so bad. Number three, you and your client's opinion of the price? Too high. Now, at that point in time, when they submitted this, we had 16 offers. 13 of those offers were at or above list price. Number four. Oh, it hurts. Please rate this listing. Five is the best. One is the worst. You don't have to choose five or one. You can choose three. They went straight to the worst. So this is the worst listing. Number five comments recommendation. Good luck. Now, it's tough to tell exactly what they mean by good luck. Like, is it a hey, good luck. You'll get this sold or it's like, yeah, right. Good luck. Don't know for sure which good luck this is. So here it is in all its glory. This was a property that had been a rental for over 30 years. The owner was using a property management company because he was based out of state. He had them doing annual walkthroughs of the property and giving them reports. And he was completely shocked at the condition of the property. He hired us to help get the renters out. And then we had to get it cleaned up and trashed out so that we could sell this property. And that we did. So we had our photographer come in and he's a good photographer. But it showed that this is a property that needed a lot of work. And we also put in this description that the property needed a lot of work. We knew that this was not the right home for everybody. And you can see it was unique, had some unique features. That is one ugly kitchen. Oh, let's go back. The bathrooms are as ugly as they looked in that picture. There was no Photoshop funny business. At the end of the day, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, to pretend it's a swan is not fair. And we didn't do that with this listing. You can see this bathroom is pretty ugly. And there's no point for the landlord, the owner, to spend money on fixing it up. He was selling it as is. And that is what we were looking for as a buyer who was going to take it as is. So you can see and I want your opinion. Go ahead and put it below. Do you think this is the worst? Actually, when people came in at the open house, we had a lot of people, a couple hundred people came through over the two weekends. And many of them said it wasn't as bad as they thought. And as you can see, it ended up being a happy ending for the property owner. The list price was on the lower end of market value is eight forty nine. We ended up getting a total of 20 offers and it went for over a hundred thousand over list price. And that was in about two weeks. We take a little bit longer to sell properties. We want to make sure that we extract every bit of equity out of potential buyers for owner. So in about two weeks, we had it under contract and it closed. So within a month after taking possession and getting it cleaned out, the owner had nine hundred and sixty five thousand dollars in his hands. Oh, would you have guessed that's the price? It's important not to take this feedback personally. Now, it's easy for me to say, right? I'm a real estate agent. Well, right now, I just finished remodeling my entire home to put it on the market to sell. I could easily be offended when people say, why didn't you do this or why did you do that? But I can't take it personally, and nor should any agent take it personally or seller take it personally. When they get feedback like this may have just been a bad day for that person or it really is just something that doesn't appeal to them. And that doesn't matter. At the end of the day, they're not your buyer. There's no reason to take it personally. Move on to the next person that is your buyer. Honesty is the best policy. So we can give silly euphemisms in the description and try to sugarcoat it. But at the end of the day, this thing was a fixer. The other important thing when you have a fixer, in addition to showing it's a fixer, talking about the fact that it's a fixer, is also pricing it right, pricing it like a fixer. Now, this person who said it's the worst, this agent and the client still thought it was priced too high. And that's the other important lesson. And that is one person's trash is another person's treasure. We had multiple offers at this point in time. And the majority of them were at or above list price. So because one person and one agent didn't like it doesn't mean we're not going to sell this thing. That's why pricing it right is so important, particularly on a property that's a fixer, to make sure you get it in front of enough people to see it and walk through it and not call it the worst and actually think maybe it's the best for what they want to do with it. And the last lesson, and this is a very important one. Please pay attention. That is, do not sell your property off market. And how did we get to that? What if you decided to sell your property off market, meaning you're not going to put it on a multiple listing service, not going to get in front of a bunch of agents? You're going to sell it to whoever brings you an offer. Well, what if the person who brought you the offer is the same person who ranked this property as the worst? That person was not willing to pay 8.50 and they're not willing to probably pay eight for the property. That's the problem. If you sell off market, you don't know if you're talking to the person who thinks it's a one or the person who thinks it's a five. The person who thinks it's a five is going to pay more. So the important lesson to understand is by selling off market, not exposing it to everyone, you may end up selling it for far less because you don't know which buyer you've stumbled across. You want to find the one that is willing to pay the most for this property. And you can only do that by spreading the word, getting it in front of everybody, negotiating hard and ultimately accepting that offer that is the highest and most likely to close. That's how you do it. You sell off market and you don't know who you are going under contract with. And this same thing applies even if your house isn't as ugly as this one. Let us hear your stories below. Have you seen any properties that have traded for a much higher dollar amount than you would have ever guessed? Subscribe to our free weekly email newsletter so you know about properties coming, even if they're ugly. Thanks for tuning in. This has been Christian Walsh, real estate agent with Wire Associates. And we can't wait to hear from you. The next thing you need to know is in this video right here.