In waiting for a listing to come back in the mail and carpets to be cleaned, I finally was able to get a home listed today which has been in limbo for the past week. When I met with the seller over a week ago, and while she was giving me the tour, I took the liberty to tell her I’d sold her home a great number of years ago. I mentioned the previous owners’ names, but she didn’t know them because the home had change hands several times since then. I said, “I was happy at the time to have it sold due to the market conditions in those years.” There were far more homes on the market during that decade as well as the mortgage interest rates being very high compared to today’s. It took some doing in getting it sold due to the number of competing homes on the market. There was one thing that was holding the home back from having a sold sign in the front yard and that was it not having a garage. I remember more than one debate I had with the sellers when encouraging them to build a garage. The husband finally caved and agreed but with one caveat, “You’d better make darn sure our home sells if I build a garage.” That was a statement that certainly put me on notice. About a month later the new garage was finished and of course the seller was on even more of a burn for me to sell it. Believe it or not, if my recollection serves me correctly, the home sold in less than a month after the garage was finished. Since that time, those sellers continued to be clients of mine for other real estate transactions. I’m sure I’ll get a call from them when they notice I have it listed. Walking through it today while taking photos certainly brought back fond memories. The home is located at 409 – 12th St. SE here in Mason City. There’ve been additional improvements made since I was last in it and I’m in hopes there’ll be yet another buyer who’ll find it a great place to start creating memories. I listed it at $65,000.00 which is a fair price considering it has central air, newer windows, main floor laundry, patio doors, a deck, and of course a newer garage. It’s located in the Roosevelt School area which is also appealing to many buyers. It has over 1,000 square feet of living area on the main floor but it doesn’t look like it’s that big from the street. It’s one of those homes which is deceiving from the exterior. The above photo is the street view.
Click on the link below for more details of this home.
Late this afternoon I had to run out to a home for signatures from one of my customers who’s working on getting it cleaned up after a tenant moved out. She’d mentioned earlier how filthy the tenant had left the place but when looking at it with my own eyes, I was certainly brought up to speed with the visuals. There were hundreds of nail holes to be filled, the greasy paw prints on the light switch plates, around the door jambs, and likely everywhere else a person normally touches on a daily basis with dirty hands. I asked her why she’d painted the rooms such crazy colors. She howled, “I didn’t paint these rooms! The tenants took it upon themselves to paint.” I said, “I’m glad you said that since the sloppy paint job I’m looking at was making me wonder if a broom was used instead of a brush.” She motioned for me to come look at the bath tub. It was painted with an off-white paint with many runs and drips. She then said, “After I started scrapping the paint off, I discovered that those tenants were the type who’d rather put a fresh coat of paint on the tub rather than clean it.” I was in shock to see when looking closer how right she was. I said, “Well, I hope this form of freshening up of one’s home doesn’t become a fad to where whenever the house gets really dirty, you don’t take the extra days to clean it, you just grab a few gallons of paint and slop over the build-up of grime.” I drove away while hearing those tenants in my mind saying to each other, “Lets don’t clean it. We’ll just paint it.”
