Ring Tones and House Listing

Over the past days, I've had lots of people come through and look at the house. Traffic was the heaviest on Friday and Saturday, tailed off a bit on Sunday, and just a handful of people on the weekdays. A total of perhaps 20 or 25 people have come through.

Usually, the buyer's agent will call up to give notice. If they can't reach me, the message is typically "I'd like to show your house at X p.m. and if that is a problem, please call my back at XYZ". I got tired of talking to so many buyer's agents, I decided I needed a way to tell one way calling.

Enter ring tones - my phone, a Nokia 3120, has caller groups, which allow me to sort my contacts into various categories. I set the default ring to "Heavenly", and put all my friends into their own group with the ring tone "Robotique". Now what happens in when somebody I know calls, I hear Robotique. And when I hear "Heavenly" instead, I know somebody is calling that isn't in my address book - e.g. a buyer's agent. If it is convenient I answer, but if not, I don't worry about it and check the message later when I can.

So far, nobody has offered on the home. My realtor called up the other realtors to get feedback, and generally heard some people didn't like the yard layout, and others didn't like the kitchen. As for the yard, the back is small - most of my yard is on the side and half of that is on a gentle hill. My kitchen isn't updated - cabinets are older I suppose - but this is hardly something I'm going to address before selling.

So, my realtor suggested dropping the price by $5000. She's going to do another market analysis to see if there are new homes on the market. We had originally priced it a little higher to account for roof negotiations, and it looks like for whatever reason, that was too high. Hopefully it will sell at the new price; I think we will let it list for a week or two more before changing anything.