I Listed a Property for 1$ - Find out what happened!!

Hi Kurt Wannebo here. I actually a few months ago listed a property for ONE DOLLAR! I’m excited to tell you the story behind it and what the outcome was. Alright so here’s the background story of this, I meet with Sellers all the time and many times they want to list their property at a much higher price. Because they feel like every buyers is going to write an offer lower than their list price and they haven’t seen a lot of properties out there like their neighbors who have sold for above list so they want to be very conservative which is fine, I work with clients like that all the time. But likewise there are a lot of agents out there who have no track record or experience of selling a property over list price. Because they just haven’t seen it, they haven’t been taught how to do it or they don’t have any experience doing it. I even know some very experienced agents that have been around for years and they tell their clients look you can always go down in price but you can’t go back up well I know that not to be true. The reason is because I’ve sold 100’s of properties well above the list price ten thousand, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand. My record is actually selling a property for $225,000 over the list price! So I know that it can be done. Sometimes I tell Sellers look if I where to list your house for a dollar, I can promise you it wouldn’t sell for a dollar. I would have a thousand offers and in the end I would have a couple buyers left that were willing to pay somewhere near the market value. But sometimes Sellers think I’m crazy right and I never wanted to truly do that for somebody until a few months ago.

So, I found myself in a position where I was going to sell one of my properties near the beach and I thought this would be an excellent time to test out my theory and strategy of listing a home for ONE DOLLAR and just see what happens. I really wanted to try it out. So here’s the premise, my property was easily peg marked as far as comparables were concerned at $1.3 million and that was easy to determine because my neighbor who’s an exact same model match and identical just sold two months prior for $1.3 million. That was the target price that I was shooting for, what I did at the point is that we did our normal marketing campaign and prepared the property. I threw it on the market for $1! So what happened? Within about 10 minutes, I had my first offer and it was $400. It was above the list price, but obviously was I willing to accept it at that time? Not yet, because my phones were ringing off the hook just like I anticipated. For the first day, it was insane, we were getting calls from agents across the country, buyers, everything, it was just insane. Then another offer came in at $1,000, and then one came in at $10,000 then one came in at $1,000. After a couple of days I have proved my point. However, what I decided to do from there because people will say: “That’s just an extreme example!” what I did is that I adjusted the list price. And this time, I changed the price up to $1 million. Well below what it was worth and what I was willing to accept but I still was pricing it lower. The end result of that is this, instead of a thousand calls within a few days, the call subsided a bit but they were still incredibly high, much higher than what we normally would get if we priced it much higher than the $1.3 million price point, showings were going bonkers and offers were coming and we kind of weeded out the riff raff at that point and really got down with some serious buyers who understood and knew the area, who were looking for properties in that area. I think one of them might have missed on that other unit that was a match to mine that didn’t sell. And the end result was this; I ended up with the final buyers, the final buyer’s price of $1.35 million. In essence $50k higher than the recent sale was and $350k higher than what our list price was at that time.

What was the end result? Full disclosure here, I did not end up selling the property, and the reason was I was offered a phenomenal offer for somebody to come in and rent it, much higher than what I was expecting or anticipating. I did not sell the property, so full disclosure there, but it still proves my point that listing a property for ONE DOLLAR doesn’t mean it’s going to sell low. Or even the fact that I listed it at a $1 million, $300k less than what it was truly worth doesn’t mean that I’m not going to get offers and still find those buyers that are willing to pay market value or sometimes in this case if you have a feeding frenzy in a bidding war over the listing price.

Now, I’m not telling you to go out there and list your property for low prices, I’m just proving a point that when people are sometimes very conservative and think they can only list high, there are other strategies that exist out there. Also, I would never encourage you to list property at a price lower than what you are willing to accept, especially if you are working with an agent who does not have a proven track record of selling properties for thirty, forty, fifty, sixty thousand dollars over list price. It is a very defined and specific skill set that not a lot of agents have. In my case, I can show you over 100 properties I’ve sold over list price and print it out simply from the MLS. And what I mean by over list price is I don’t mean five or ten thousand dollars, those are just instances where they listed it and then a buyer on their own came in over the list price. I’m talking about true negotiating where it gets to the forty, fifty, sixty, eighty, ninety, to a hundred thousand dollars over list price, that’s true negotiating.

I just want to share this story that we went through a few months ago with my team and it is quite interesting how people reacted to it.

Thank you,  Kurt Wannebo