We Managed to Sell Our Home

When we put our Dallas house on the market for $490,000 in February, we thought it would sell in weeks with little discounting.

Talk about being delusional.

We ended up lowering the price of our house five times before it finally sold last month. We didn't get our first offer until late June, and it was $102,000 below where we had started.

All the uncertainty made us delay buying a new home near New York City, and we've been scrambling to find a place before the school year starts. During my 28 years as a journalist, I've moved 11 times for my job. This was in some ways the hardest one.

The whole experience made me a tiny part of a huge story -- the collapse in housing prices -- affecting millions of Americans. It was humbling for me, your typical know-it-all reporter, to find myself caught up in a situation where I had no ready answers.

In previous columns, I've waxed about my penny-pinching approach on everything from restaurant meals to vacations to buying new books. But all that pales in comparison to the stakes during a home sale. In our case, we needed to extract as much money as possible from our Dallas home so we could afford the higher prices in the Northeast.

My wife, Clarissa, and I were on the same page for some decisions. But we quarreled early on how much to spend fixing up the house -- and later on how quickly to chop the price when it wouldn't sell.

Whereas Clarissa has always been the generous one, and I the one who sweats every last dollar, she wanted to hold out for a higher price, convinced the house was worth it. I became haunted by the belief that the market was tanking, and that we needed to get our price down as quickly as possible and get the house sold now.

Our odyssey began last fall when The Wall Street Journal named me its personal-finance editor, a New York-based job. For the previous three-plus years, I had been its Dallas bureau chief. The plan was that I would move the family to northern New Jersey in June when the school year ended.

It soon became clear that Clarissa and I had different visions for getting the house ready for sale. I simply wanted to paint it and correct obvious defects, such as exterior wood that rotted during heavy rains last year. Clarissa wanted to redo the kitchen, install new fixtures in at least one of the bathrooms and much, much more. I fretted we wouldn't get that money back when we sold.

So we compromised. We spent $2,000 putting granite countertops and a new sink in the kitchen, and we merely painted the bathrooms.

But Clarissa didn't stop there. She paid a carpenter to put inlaid patterns on the wooden mantle. She spent hundreds on plants. She put in new lighting fixtures and new curtains and replaced a tattered awning.

Periodically, I would try to get her to slow down the spending, and she would tell me to buzz off. I was the one forcing the family to move yet again, and this time she was going to do the things to get top dollar for her house so she could afford a decent house in New Jersey.

We had paid about $360,000 for the house in 2004. Now, with all the things we'd fixed or improved over the years, I figured our total investment was more like $390,000.

We had reason to believe we could come out way ahead. Our 1937 brick-and-stone house sat in a pretty neighborhood of older homes and towering trees about five miles from downtown Dallas. The city's real-estate market had remained relatively strong, and we lived in one of the strongest submarkets.

Based on selling prices the previous fall, our Realtor, Gia Marshello of the local Coldwell Banker office, predicted our three-bedroom house would fetch $485,000. We put the asking price at $490,000, and waited for the buyers to line up. They didn't.

After a month, only 10 had visited our house, and I was beginning to panic. We had planned a March home-buying trip to New Jersey, but I put it on hold -- indefinitely.

Gia suggested that we discount the house by $10,000 or perhaps $15,000. I pushed for the bigger discount. Clarissa reluctantly agreed, even though she saw comparable houses priced the same or higher in our neighborhood. The problem was that they weren't selling either.

The feedback from people visiting our house was worrisome. Too many said the layout didn't work for them. Our house had two bedrooms and one bathroom upstairs, and one bedroom and one bathroom downstairs. Parents with small children wanted all the bedrooms on one floor.

A couple of buyers complained the kitchen wasn't open enough. I sputtered to Gia: "This is a 1937 house -- they didn't make open kitchens back then. We're not getting the right buyers."

At one point, Gia left me a voicemail on the latest developments. She sent out postcards about our house to everyone in the neighborhood and buried a statue of St. Joseph in our yard, which some believe brings good luck to home sellers. "Oh my gosh," I thought to myself. "This is our marketing plan?"

As the months stretched on, we kept lowering our price, first to $469,000, then to $455,000, then to $448,000 with another $4,000 in "credits." We thought we had a buyer with that last price. A young woman made three visits to the home and told us to let her know if any other offers came in. But her father was paying for the home, and he didn't like the house, and that was that.

Gia left no stone unturned to sell our house. She held open house after open house. Each time we lowered our price, she would contact anyone who had expressed interest in the house. Nothing worked.

I talked to a real-estate agent friend of mine in New Jersey, and he advised us to cut the house to its bare-bones price. "If only three houses sell in your neighborhood, you've got to make sure you're one of the three homes," he told me.

Gia advised the same. Clarissa finally caved in, and we priced the home on a Monday afternoon in late June at $429,900, putting it thousands of dollars below most comparable houses in our neighborhood. Almost immediately, buyers flocked to check it out. Gia got word an offer was coming. On Thursday, she called me. The offer was for $388,000 -- more than $40,000 below our last asking price.

How could this be, we asked ourselves. We just made this the best bargain in the neighborhood, and now this guy wants another 40 grand off. Clarissa wanted to reject the offer, but I felt we had to make it work. After all, we'd had the house on the market for more than four months, and this was our first offer. There was no guarantee there'd be another one.

So we exchanged a series of offers and counteroffers with the buyer. It was like pulling teeth. After three days, he offered $399,310. Clarissa found this insulting and wanted to counter with $412,666, to send a message. "I don't think that's a good idea," I told her.

Finally, on Monday, the buyer raised his offer to $409,000. I got him up to $410,000, and I was resigned to sign a contract later that day. Clarissa, who had to sign off on any deal, was convinced that would be a big mistake and we ought to wait for another buyer. She called Gia to say, "Don't let him give away the house."

While all this was playing out, a new offer rolled in that afternoon from another buyer.

"Are you sitting down?" Gia asked me. "They want to offer full price," or $429,900. Gia then went back to the first buyer to say we had a higher offer, in case he wanted to improve his bid. He didn't. We signed the $429,900 contract.

We soon met the buyers, a young couple expecting their first baby. They said they were thrilled to get the house. And they seemed to appreciate the unusual plants Clarissa had picked out and all her touches inside the house. Her strategy had worked after all.

Our selling price amounted to a 12% discount from our starting price. I don't expect any violins for us. Some regions of California have seen home prices decline more than 30% from their actual selling prices a year earlier. We got off very lightly by comparison.

Our house went on the market when there were few homes for sale in our neighborhood. That's no longer true. When I took my last drive through my old neighborhood, the streets were beginning to bristle with "for sale" and "open house" signs -- though many were above our price range. I shudder to think.