St. Joe and the Low Ball Offer

As most of you already know, we put our house on the market last month. It's such an adorable little cottage--looking at it right here, don't you think you'd just love to make an offer on it right now?

Unfortunately, this is a terrible time to be selling a house (luckily, it will be a great time for us to buy a house after we close on this one). Despite being the "best bargain in Ladue School District," we had very little traffic until last week.

Now here's where I have to confess that I got desperate. St Louis has a tradition of using St Joseph to help sell your home. The idea is that you bury a St Joseph statue in your front yard, upside down facing the realtor sign, and "he" helps your house sell quickly, in exchange for getting a place of honor in your new home. So I moseyed over to Catholic Supply (conveniently located across the street from Ted Drewes ) and bought my own little statue for $1.25. It had been sitting on a shelf waiting for some action (Caprice insisted it was lost from the "baby Jesus set" and needed to be put away) until last week when I finally asked James bury it. Before we buried the statue last Friday, we had 3 showings. Since then, we've had 4 showings, and a very well attended open house.

And yesterday, we got our first offer on the place. Unfortunately, it was a low-ball offer. The guy wanted us to pay him a 4% concession to cover his closing costs, and he wanted too large of a price cut as well. The more we read his offer, the more we realized we didn't even want to counter it. We refused his offer and hope he's serious enough about buying to muster up something better.

Today, we had another showing scheduled for 9:30-10:30. I arrived home at 10:30 and wondered if anyone had even been here, because no one had signed the guest list, and nothing had been moved at all. No sooner did I sit down and start working than the realtor and buyer showed up! They were running late from another house, but saw my cast and told me to stay. The best part is that this was a second showing from Friday--a single woman who had been browsing our neighborhood when James invited her in for a look around. This time she came back with her realtor. I hope this means she's seriously interested. If so, we may have another, more promising offer to look at soon.

I hope St Joe is doing whatever magic he does--he's going to have to work hard to earn that most honored spot in the toybox of our next home.