Selling Our Old House

Since we decided to use a program like Orchard it's been pretty stress-free for us.

Basically how Orchard works is, they assign us a realtor and help us all through the buying phase. They'll have an inspector come out and do an initial assessment to make sure there are no surprises in the inspection later, and it allows us to work on some of the fixes ahead of time. Then once we are ready to buy a home, they buy our home from us at a "Guaranteed sale price" to make sure we have money for the closing of a new house. They'll give us a week of overlap on the two homes (which makes it so convenient for moving to a new place) and then they'll clean, list, and show the old house for us.

This allows us to avoid ALL showings and enjoy our new home during the process. This is extremely nice during a pandemic, as we really didn't want to deal with strangers entering our home and worrying about our pets and keeping a completely sterile house, etc.

Then once the old house sells, you'll get another check for the difference in price of the Guaranteed Sale Price and what the new buyers bought it for.

You're given a certain amount of time that your house is listed to be eligible for that profit to be eligible, however, since our housing market is so competitive, we were not concerned about that being an issue. (We saw the competitiveness firsthand when we were house hunting)

Our house was only on the market for a weekend (Saturday-Monday). There were 31 showings scheduled during that time. We received two offers for listing price within the first day, and a third on the Monday morning. After some discussion and a little negotiation on the terms, we were under contract and moving forward.

The wildest part of the listed weekend is we were able to see the feedback on our home. Most of which said, "price is too high" which is completely understandable, because the housing market where we live is insane, but that's the market...

However, there was one realtor's feedback that was just absolutely nasty. She ripped on the painting, the finishes, the yard, the price, everrrrrything. And then said "This house shouldn't sell, but in this market it probably will."

Now, we were at a point where this was just ridiculous and a bit funny to us, as we had two offers on the table at the time of her review. BUT I'm including this tidbit because it still got to me a little bit. This was our home, we put a lot of time, energy, effort, and money in fixing it up from the point of where we bought it. Also, it seemed so unnecessary to spit such venom and extremely unprofessional to leave this as a review on a listing.

But here's the thing: There will always be a naysayer, a negative Nancy, and you shouldn't let it get to you. They're out there, and whatever they're going through is on them, not on you.

Anyway...

During inspection, our buyers only asked for the roof to be fixed, which is perfect because we were already in the process of it- our insurance was just taking way longer than we'd like on it.

The appraisal came back below what we were hoping, but there was an appraisal gap, so we didn't have to change anything there.

In the end, we were in a major crunch because of the roof replacement. Apparently our roof was a unique one, requiring lots of special approvals. Also, the insurance guy and the appraisal guy were a bit more delayed in getting the checks to the right people, paperwork, and so on... BUT we were scheduled to replace the roof the week of closing. (Cutting it close, I know...)

THEN, there was a snow storm set for the day they were going to start, so it got delayed... and the soonest they could replace the roof was to start on closing day...

How the heck is that supposed to work? My thoughts too. Well, the buyers were fine with closing and putting the "cash at closing" into escrow until the roof was officially finished, inspected, etc. (And why wouldn't they? Otherwise it would mess up their moving plans)

The house closed, buyers moved in, and the roof got fixed.

Being on the other end of the process has been way less stressful, but the roof replacement was definitely an unpleasant and tedious process that is unfortunately STILL going on months later.

(we are waiting to get the escrowed money, but there's a holdup with the receipt from the insurance company)

We were also very fortunate that our house didn't have HOAs for people to overcome. Selling a house with HOA fees is much more difficult than selling one without. I don't think COVD affected the house selling process as much as we would have guessed, because as I said above, it was only on the market for a couple days. The market is so crazy that it ended up being the perfect storm on the selling side for us.