All right guys, we just sold The Roosevelt. Woo-hoo!
There is absolutely no question about it, this is the hardest home I’ve ever sold.
This is Eric Sztanyo from Keller Williams realty and TeamSztanyo.com where we are helping families find their way home.
Looking Back From The Beginning
For those of you who have watched my TikTok channel, you might know, you might recognize this house. This is actually a house that I own. This is the first house I ever bought on Clough Pike in Anderson Township. My wife and I bought this house. It was the first house we ever bought. We lived in it when we were Young Life Leaders. When we were in our 20s. We had our first child in this house. There’s so many memories. We did a home church out of this house, literally out of our basement we had people. This was after we lived in it for about four years. It was rented to different Young Life Leaders for eight years.
There’s a serious emotional attachment to this house. Also, one reason why this is the hardest home I’ve ever sold. This house has been owned since 2007, 13 plus years, and it’s selling today. On one aspect, it’s very difficult just to be seeing this thing go and going to someone else because it’s been used so well for this community in Anderson Township and South East Cincinnati.
How Did It Became The Hardest Home I’ve Ever Sold
But the real difficulty, what’s been hard to get this thing sold is this is, right now we’re going to close with the sixth buyer on this house. I had five freaking five releases on this house from buyers.
I’ve never heard anything like it. I’ve talked to other people in my office, they’re like, “Are you kidding me? That is nuts.” I had five releases. And I’ll show you in the basement, but when we bought the house in ’07, in ’06 the previous owners put in some power braces in the basement, so they had a 25 year warranty. There’s no movement in the basement. It’s lifetime waterproof, but that scared people. And then the second thing was our garage is older. This house was built in 1926 I think. And the garage has shifted a little bit.
Because of those two things, we had our first buyer, she backed out, got a mutual release. Second buyer, same thing. And I’m like, “You got to be kidding me, this is crazy.” Third buyer, and I’m telling the agents, “Here are there things, here’s what came back on the inspection. Do not give me an offer unless your buyer is going to close.” They’re like, “Oh yeah, no problem. They’re definitely going to close. They love the house.” Third buyer I get a release. I’m like, “This is freaking insane.” Now I’m just getting pissed off. This sure is the hardest home I’ve ever sold!
And even before I talked about these other releases, what’s crazy is the plans for this house. I didn’t even know if I wanted to flip this house. And you can see, kind of behind me, we did the whole deal. But my renters moved out in, let’s see April. So this has been a nine and a half month process since my renters moved out. Man, I’m so glad that we’re freaking getting this thing signed. And I’ve got another story about that.
But let me continue on the story. I was going to rent it out long term, I was considering doing that, but then I said, “No, why don’t I just try to sell it wholetail, and let someone else do the flip.” I was busy selling other homes and doing other investments and things like that, I didn’t really want to manage a flip in the middle of spring/summer last year, when it was really crazy and I was really busy. I put it out there for about 10 days, I had the third buyer, and then she got sick and she backed out. That wasn’t a technical contract, but I had forgot about that buyer. Then we did the flip, it took three, four months. We got it back on the market, and we had these three releases. The fourth buyer came in, that was a financing issue. After the third release, here’s what I did. I had a structural engineer come out, give us a report, check off on everything say, “Hey, it’s okay.” I had the Basement Doctor come out to the garage, which you can see behind me here and give a quote for stabilizing the garage.
The fourth buyer backed out because of financing. So they couldn’t get their financing. They wanted the house, but they screwed up, whatever. I’m like, “You have got to be freaking kidding me.” This thing has given me a heart attack. Like, so much stress and so much emotions is in this house. I can’t believe we’re actually closing it today.
And then fifth buyer, same thing, we gave him the inspection report, they had the instructional engineer report, we thought for sure that was going through, and their buyer’s agent was shocked, just like I was when they sent a release. I mean absolutely bonkers. I can’t believe it’s taken this long to sell this house. Sixth buyer’s here, sixth buyer loves it, sixth buyer’s closing today.
I’ve never heard of anything like this. This is absolutely the hardest home I’ve ever sold! We kept the price fairly high, because people kept giving us the offers. And it’s not like they were giving us things to fix. We were saying, “If you want us to fix something, we will. Just tell us in the inspection’s report what you want fixed.” But you can see us going through this house, this is a nice house, it’s a nice flip. People just got scared for whatever reason. It was so wild. On this last buyer, they did, they asked for the garage to fixed, so we’re fixing that. And there’s a few minor electric things that we got done, and one minor plumbing thing we got done. So we’re good to go.
We’re closing on this thing. I don’t think, with all the emotions, with all the history, with everything that’s wrapped up in this house, I don’t know if I’ll ever have a house as hard to sell as this one. Not only was it extremely hard to get to the closing table, which we’re heading today.
We’ve had symptoms in our house this morning, or the last few weeks of cough. We’ve all tested negative, but this morning, one of my sons on an at home test, tested faint line positive on that home test. We’re like, “Is that a false positive?” We don’t know. So the title company was like, “You can’t come.” But we’re working around. We’re all going up there, we’re going to wait in the van, we’re not going inside. And there is a notary in the office who already had COVID, who’s going to bring out the papers for us to sign in our van. Unbelievable how crazy this has been. I’m like, “I don’t care what it takes. I will do whatever you say, just let me close on this house. I have to close on this house. It has to be gone.” I love this house. It’s called The Roosevelt, we named it that. It’s been affectionate, it’s been a huge part of my family story, but today it is time for it to go
The Day We Are All Hoping For! Still With A Challenge..
We’ve had symptoms in our house this morning, or the last few weeks of cough. We’ve all tested negative, but this morning, one of my sons on an at-home test, tested faint line positive on that home test. We’re like, “Is that a false positive?” We don’t know. So the title company was like, “You can’t come.” But we’re working around. We’re all going up there, we’re going to wait in the van, we’re not going inside. And there is a notary in the office who already had COVID, who’s going to bring out the papers for us to sign in our van. Unbelievable how crazy this has been. I’m like, “I don’t care what it takes. I will do whatever you say, just let me close on this house. I have to close on this house. It has to be gone.” I love this house. It’s called The Roosevelt, we named it that. It’s been affectionate, it’s been a huge part of my family story, but today it is time for it to go. Although it’s the hardest home I’ve ever sold. At the end of the day, the experience is worth the while.
All right guys, we just sold The Roosevelt. Woo-hoo! It happened.
Tell Us Your Story!
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