To paraphrase the famous line about voting in Chicago: Check real estate listings early and often. Perseverance can be the key to helping clients be at the right place at the right time to get a great value—even in high-priced zip codes.
Here’s how that rule of thumb recently played out for my client. We had been viewing homes in Redwood City for quite some time and came across five brand new luxury homes in a gated community. We were in the beginning stages of the client’s search, and the homes were priced at the high $2 million to the low $3 million mark. Though we liked the house, we had just begun the home search and were not familiar yet with the current market inventory and pricing. I suggested the client wait until the first of the five homes sold so that we could get a better handle on their value.
As we viewed other homes, I kept checking the MLS for the status of those five trophy homes. One eventually showed that a sale was pending and was scheduled to close within a few weeks. As the deadline for the close of escrow approached and then passed, I checked again and again. When the listing seemed permanently stalled, I started digging—and learned the developer had gone under. The homes foreclosed and were now bank owned.
I immediately called my client, explained the opportunity this new information presented, and suggested he move quickly to view the property before the bank put it on the market. The client made an offer, which the bank accepted after we’d negotiated it down to $2.1 million.
Thus the lesson of checking listings early and often. If I hadn’t stayed on top of that listing, I’d have never learned the property was in foreclosure—and I’m sure it would have sold immediately at the bank’s planned listing price of $2.2 million. Perseverance helped my client get the home of his dreams for a price much lower than what we had originally anticipated. Shortly after we had purchased the property, the other listing that was available also sold prior to the property being marketed on the MLS.
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