House #49 has been listed for about 6 weeks, and we’re not getting nearly as much interest as I had hoped. I mentioned in my update post the other day that we’ve had some house issues, and this is one of the houses we’ve had issues with. Our sheetrock/painter did a horrible job in this house, and unfortunately, neither my project manager, my partner, nor I noticed the extent of the remaining issues when the house went up for sale (this one is in Milwaukee and I didn’t see it in person between the time it was listed and several weeks later).
But, our buyers have certainly noticed, and they haven’t been happy. While the renovation — in general — is great, the issues with the drywall and the poor paint job is a negative first impression that has stuck with our buyers. And given that we’re trying to sell this one at a point that is about the top of the market, we’re not getting offers.
We’ve had one price drop already, and the next step is to either take the house off the market to fix the issues (which will require removing all the staging furniture and repainting, among other things) or drop the price again and sell below market value. Luckily, the issues are all cosmetic, so it’s not a major catastrophe if we need do some more work, but the fact that we’ve lost several weeks of prime selling season and have turned off so many potential buyers is certainly going to hurt or profit potential on this one. We’ll still make money, but not nearly as much as we should have.
Anyway, in the meantime, here are the staging pictures for this house:
I clicked through to the Staging photos; the house looks great! I am amazed that people aren’t looking beyond the ‘issues’… It must be REALLY bad??
So can you deal directly with the painters, or are you having to work through a GC there? Drsms you didn’t have this prob when you had your own PM there. Goes to show your Atlanta business model worked for a reason. Hope you write more about this experience sms how to deal with it/prevent it…here and/or on BP. Thanks for keeping it real (and keeping is posted).
SEEMS you didn’t have this problem.
Shane –
All our contractors in Milwaukee are subs, so we deal with them directly. We do a PM in Milwaukee, but the quality control has been spotty, and after going back to several recently finished houses, I realized that our sheetrock/paint hasn’t been up to par in a while. We fired our painters after this issue and have a couple new paint crews that we’ve been rotating for the past couple weeks — all a bit better but none that we really love…yet…
So how was the issued resolved?
Lowered the price?
The sheetrock/painter that did the sub-standard work:
1. How did you resolve the issue?
2. What was their reaction after having a few weeks pass by and then the issue pointed out?
3. Did you pay by credit card to ensure the work was done or you could challenge the charge? Or did you withhold $ from their final cash payment?
4. Did it get heated in resolving the issue? How was the conflict resolved?
Thanks
Hey Ben,
We ended up negotiating an offer before we resolved the issue. Most certainly, the offer was less than market value, and the paint/sheetrock was a good bit of the reason. Ultimately, this was our project manager’s fault for not catching the issue before paying the contractor. And this wasn’t the first bad job the contractor had done, so we had fired him by the time we realized the problem. Had we had to fix it, we just would have eaten the cost to bring in another painter.