After the appraiser butchered his appraisal of our sale on Los Robles in May – he brought it in $220,000 below the sales price based on one bad comp when I gave him five others that justified the higher price all day long – I had some concerns about going 0 for 2 on our sale of 3711 Mastodon.
It has become a common occurrence in our era of lower volume/fewer comps. In many areas there are NO recent sales to justify the value of a premium home because virtually nobody is moving.
In speaking with neighbors, they all agreed that Mastodon is one of the best homes in The Foothills. It’s one of the few at the end of a culdesac that has the big view (above).
I mentioned earlier that my recommended list price was $2,200,000. The seller was the brother of the seller of 3710 Bergen Peak, which we sold for $2,000,000 in July, 2023.
The Bergen Peak seller reads the blog, so they were happy to go with our recommended upgrades (paint, carpet, and staging) and price it attractively. It sold right away for $50,000 over list even though there was only one offer (which was pretty slick given there was no frenzy).
But the sellers of Mastodon weren’t blog fans and they toyed around with listing their home with a discount broker or maybe selling it themselves – the horror! But they had already moved out of state and the house was tenant-occupied, so getting good help was the best solution in the end.
Look at the action this year though:
With only one sale above $2 million (and that was 24% larger), and a real dog that was listed for sale at $1,745,000 a block away, my $2.2 million sure looked like full retail.
I agreed to test it at $2.3 million, then the seller talked me into $2.4 million, then they wanted $2.5 million. And no staging. Yikes.
I went ahead with it to test the market, because who am I to say? The view is spectacular, the house is a creampuff, and if a cash buyer came along who just had to have the best house for sale in the zip code, I might get lucky. But if that was going to happen, it would only be in the first week.
Thankfully, the tenants were moving out so the seller was motivated. When I suggested that we lower the price early and often, they agreed:
Meanwhile, I’m getting no showings.
As mentioned in a previous post, the market seemed to shift in mid-May, and the results here fed that belief. But it’s only June – doesn’t there have to be at least one buyer being transferred from out-of-state who will want a premium offering?
Once we got down to $2,250,000, I finally got two contenders to look at it. One ended up buying the similarly-priced 4,000sf+ home on Lemon Leaf, and the other lowballed us at $2,050,000. Their agent tried to hold tight, but when I told her that we’re not budging off $2,225,000, she relented.
But I had to agree to the deal being contingent upon the appraisal.
I had to battle the 3,725sf in the only comp of the year that might help me. The house on Glen is right across the street from townhouses, and the street parking is full – at night, you have trouble parking in front of your own $2.2 million house. There is no view, and it’s as flat as a pancake, which means you have neighbors in your face on three sides.
There were a smattering of older (2023) comps over $2 million that I pieced together with full explanations as to why the market has maintained it’s value (or gone flat, depending upon who’s looking).
I got lucky when the appraiser ended up being a long-timer who has appraised others we’ve sold so we were friendly, and she bought my story.
The appraisal came in at $2,225,000, and clinched the deal.
Get Good Help!
