The House

Apparently we’ve over-priced our real property for the current market conditions. Ah, well.

The demand for single-family homes in our area is, according to realtors, still strong. However, the demand for a 3 bedroom, 1 bath, single-family home on a .55 acre lot, on a well-trafficked county road, next door to, as one customer put, “Sanford & Son,” is not high enough to warrant the price we were asking. We are negotiable, but in order to make the sale worthwhile — that is, to enable us to pay for a 4 bedroom, 2 bath house, which we like, near Poughquag — does not permit much room for movement once the realtor’s fee is factored out.

If I were obsessive enough about book-keeping, I would have kept more data points about our customer interactions so that I could graph the ebb and flow against the calendar, comparing the efficacy of various print and on-line media to the realtors’ multiple-listing services. But I didn’t. We had a fair amount of interest when the house first came on the market, and when it first entered the MLS, but interest tapered off after a few weeks, reaching a steady state of three to four calls per week.

In any case, our house is off the market, unless, of course, someone makes an offer we cannot refuse. And we’re back to our original plan from 2002: remodeling. Though I think ours is one of the better-looking examples in the area, we plan to turn this ranch built in 1958 into a new old house built from the patterns of home.