Selling our San Jose Home

I've been keeping you in suspense about our San Jose home. I posted about our difficulties selling but didn't tell you what happened.

Our contract with our realtor ran out at the end of Summer 2006. We were contacted by many realtors who specialize in "expireds", expired listings. This actually seemed to be a fairly competent group of realtors. They advocated listing at a considerably lower price than we had been listing. One thought he could get some bidding going by listing it low enough to attract attention.

One of the realtors who contacted us wanted to buy the house himself. He set the price low enough that he got all the benefit from not paying a third party realtor the commission. This price seemed really low at the time and it was really hard to sell at that price.

In late September I was offered a job in Portland which is where we were wanting to move, so selling the house became a fairly urgent priority. I took the realtor's lowball offer. I considered it selling at about the price I wanted with a 10% commission to get a quick sale. The sale went very smoothly, he got his financing and cleared contingencies quickly. We had already done inspections and he accepted ours.

We were able to buy a house in the Portland area so I could start my new job on the day the house was available for us to move into. We were able to stay with my brother-in-law a few days while we prepared our house to move in.

We like it here in the Portland area and real estate in the Portland area has so far retained more value than California real estate. So, overall it worked out well.