Honolulu open house draws a crowd

Ever have an open house and nobody visited?  Or just a handful of visitors in three hours?  What a drag.  We recently listed a preforeclosure house in Honolulu.  This house appealing because it's duplex (two separate residences for one price) and its location near downtown.

The owners bought the house in January 2007 for $810,000.   We listed the house for $750,000 and after 10 days there were a few inquiries but no big charge of buyers.  The owners had waited awhile to list the property, now we were near the deadline for a foreclosure auction.  They made the bold decision to drop the price $200,000 and get some activity.  It worked!  Suddenly we had one of the lowest priced homes for sale in metropolitan Honolulu, especially for a multifamily home with 5 bedrooms and 3 baths.

The offers started coming in.  Of course no matter what price we use, somebody will always want to lowball.  We had inquiries about writing offers for $480,000, $510,000, etc.  Come on, this is already instant equity!  Another couple of days passed and the offers were coming in above asking price.

On Sunday (three days after the price drop) we had an open house.  I was getting calls every half hour or so.  We had three agents ready to show our open house.   We drove up to our listing and found people waiting in line a half hour before the open house was scheduled to start! 

We setup one agent with fact sheets downstairs, in the vacant unit.  We escorted groups of people into the upstairs unit, which is tenant occupied.  This went on for hours!

Result: Nine offers total after five days with the lower price.  The highest offers went into the mid $600's. 

By the way, this is a Short Sale

A short sale is a situation where the proceeds from the sale are not expected to pay off the mortgage(s).  The current owners bought near the price peak and had 100% financing, their equity in the house is zero.  With a short sale, the seller's bank must approve the sale along with the seller.

Unfortunately the bank did not accept the offers we received.  However we're still optimistic, a lot of people looked at the house and some have come back with higher offers.

Bank says it's going to foreclosure auction

We checked back with the bank and they said the property should have been listed sooner and the offers came in too late to postpone the foreclosure auction.  I went to the auction to see who would bid on the property.  As it turned out, the auction was postponed for a month!  I called the bank afterwards and they didn't know what happened so they instructed me to call their attorney.  I called the attorney's office.  They confirmed the postponement and asked us to continue seeking higher offers.  That's what we'll do.  We've increased the price to $675,000, hoping to get an offer acceptable to the bank.

Check out our Honolulu preforeclosure home for sale.

Aloha, Mike Bates

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