Best wishes. It does seem that homes in good condition under 400K... when priced correctly.... move fairly quickly in the Mercer/Somerset/Hunterdon area...hopefully this will prove to be the case with you mom's home.

Best wishes. I think aggressive pricing will garner her a quick sale. :-)

IMO, you're right on the money! I sold at 5% commission also, and both agents were overjoyed. Without that commission, neither of their families would have had a Christmas~fact! Forget the neighbors~it's all about Mom. With realistic pricing, a home in good working order, decluttered, and as close to model-like as you can(get rid of anything that looks worn/outdated), it will sell quicker than the average house is selling.

The townhouse is listed as of today, at $240k with a 5% commission.

My brother and I were there all day today. It's looking pretty good. Open house next weekend.

Do you want to share a link for critique?

Here's the link, I'd love to get feedback.

It took a week and a half for the realtor to get the interior images uploaded. Seemed like a long time.

Here is a link that might be useful: townhouse listing

Wish places like that were around by me when I bought. looks nice to me.

It took a week and a half for the realtor to get the interior images uploaded. Seemed like a long time.

You are right. It should take less than a day.

Yes 10 days to too long to upload pictures. I hope that is not indicative of things to come.

The pictures show a nice townhouse. Why not use a bathroom pic instead of the dining room set?

Lot size but no house square footage?

desirablee Riverside typo

This home is in absolute move-in condition.
Is it? If it isn't it may turn off a prospective buyer that expects everything to be move-in ready.

Thanks for the feedback. It is a nice unit, hopefully it'll sell.

To address the specific points:

Thanks for spotting the typo. We've found several others already, I'll bring this one up too.

She may not have used a bathroom shot because it's tough to get a good photo of them.

The place IS in move-in condition. Freshly painted walls throughout, new kitchen countertops, freshly cleaned carpets, new furnace and air conditioning compressor, spotlessly clean, newer appliances. We even replaced all of the switchplate covers. It really does show like a new unit.

Alas, not a single showing yet, and it's been on the market for two weeks. That's not a good sign.

update: there was a showing today!

Unfortunately, my mother took it upon herself to "show the people around", even though she'd been told not to do that by her real estate agent and all of her children.

And apparently the people only gave her 15 minutes notice, not enough time "to clean up", in her own words. I don't think she's willing to keep the place in showable condition at all times. Even though Saturday has got to be THE day that most showings happen.

Sigh. I'm sure everything will work out fine. I'm just venting.

You said you replaced the kitchen countertop. Is the countertop in the kitchen picture the new one or the old one? If it is the old one, a picture with the updated countertop would be a good idea.

Good work with the updating and decluttering. A couple of suggestions: consider removing some of those wall hangings (mirror? sconces? in the living room near the glass door, as they take the focus away from the fireplace. Also, there are two cool looking chairs that seem to be facing away from each other at odd angles. Could you put them at angles toward each other in front of the fireplace?
Also, I think it might not be too safe for your mom to let some lookie lous in without the agent. Who knows why they are really there? The agent will pre-qualify prospective buyers.
Good luck, you sound like a great daughter.

We're about two weeks away from putting my mother's townhouse on the market. It's in Mercer County, NJ, and the market seems tough but not dead.

The timing is terrible, but she needs to move to her retirement community immediately. She recently totalled her car and has decided not to drive anymore.

My siblings and I are busy purging, packing, painting and staging. There are several comps in her neighborhood priced in the $260k range. She's planning to list at $240k and will go down to $225k. Her neighbors will hate her, but she wants a quick sale.

So far she's interviewed two real estate agents. The first one we met called a few days later and offered to cut his commission to 5%.

I hope this is over quickly.

I'm pretty sure you posted a while ago that you were going to list it....

Now, I don't know why, but I went to realtor.com, put in the specifics (3 bed / 2 bath, price $225-$250) in your mom's zip (08628) and came up empty. For some reason it is not being picked up on realtor.com & you need to find out why.

I ended up putting the address into google, came up with a listing on Trulia, then there's a button that says see more photos & details, when clicked it brings me to the KW page where I can get the MLS #. Going back to realtor.com I am able to find it using the MLS.

I checked the listing out at my agents site.. see there are 12 pictures. I'll try to look at it more later but I think I like the stove pic better then the kitchen pic they are using.

Good luck, you don't seem to have much competition, which is good.

Yep, I started this thread on January 9th and mentioned listing it, and we listed on January 12th (sooner than I'd expected!). I just doubled-checked, the listing IS on realtor.com. Try searching again with "single family house" selected.

Re: the chairs in front of the fireplace, they look good in real life but not in the photo. One faces a wall of bookshelves (and the TV) and the other faces the fireplace. The angle of the real estate agents' shot is lousy.

12 people came to yesterday's open house. Half were neighbors. One couple was very interested but has to sell a house in Ohio first. All in all, it sounded like a good turnout with positive comments. But no offer.

My mom's townhouse is under contract already! Less than a month after listing!

She was listed at $239,000. Got an offer at $227,000 and countered at $234,000, which the buyer agreed to.

Other units in her neighborhood are listed at $249,000 to $269,000. But they've been on the market for months without budging. Her listing price was really low because she wanted to sell fast.

Now I hope the contract holds up...

Congrats! Send some of that luck my way...

So far so good, the contract is holding. If the buyers manage to close on their own house in a few weeks, I think we're golden.

The buyer's inspection only turned up one repair needed. The township inspection turned up an annoying list of six items, which my brother fixed.

Minor glitches include my mother thinking she didn't need an attorney, despite the fact that she's becoming a little bit mentally confused these days. We managed to tactfully strong-arm her into changing her mind.

The new buyers have three huge dogs (Saint Bernards!). I'm glad we didn't take the realtor's advice and replace all of the carpeting. Even the carpet guy who gave us an estimate said it didn't need replacing. We cleaned it instead.

Everyone keep sending those good vibes!

Congratulations! Sounds like everything went well. Keeping fingers crossed that all continues smoothly.

Due to DH's work, we've had to sell a number of times in the past and found that the common sense "staging" techniques work really well. Sounds like your mom's home came across well. So glad for you! I'm sure it's a relief.

Here is a link that might be useful: Staging your house to sell

My mother finally closed on her townhouse sale yesterday, what a relief. I still can't believe it's over. She is comfortably moved in to a fancy retirement community and her home-owning days are behind her.

At the very last minute we hit a snag... the property requires flood insurance and the buyer got a quote of $4000 a year. This despite the fact that the development is about a thousand feet from the river, and has never flooded. They somehow got the quote down to $1900 a year, and decided to go ahead and buy the place anyway. Personally, I would have walked. I'm amazed (but delighted) by their decision.

My mother is so happy about this, she called everyone she knew last night to let them know. She even called me twice, she was so excited.

Congrats and glad it went so easy!!

Woo hoo!
Congrats!