As one who is leaving the newspaper business for a digital startup, it pains me just a bit to write this blog post. As one who spent 38 years in the newspaper business (starting in high school, so I’m not as old as that may sound) and wishes my print colleagues nothing but the best, I am mostly quite pleased to tell this story:
Mimi and I signed a deal Thursday to sell our condo after just three days on the market. And it was an ad in Tuesday’s Gazette that brought the buyer to us.
Because we had been in the condo less than two years, we figured we’d try the FSBO (for sale by owner) route for a week or two. We had never had success selling by ourselves before, but wanted to avoid the real estate commission if we could.
We had no optimism. Mimi and I have sold five houses and a townhouse and it was never a swift process. Last time around it took two or three months to find a buyer. We’ve had sales that took about six months. We didn’t even try to sell our condo in Virginia when we left in 2008 (we’ll be moving back into it), because the market there plummeted about the time we bought it and hasn’t recovered. We are real estate pessimists.
Our pessimism influenced our pricing. We priced the condo for exactly what we paid for it in 2008. Our closing costs and any negotiating room would come right out of our equity (commissions usually ate up our equity anyway). If we had to list with an agent, we would try to bump the price up a bit to give more wiggle room.
We bought a Gazette ad for seven days, about $75 with my employee discount. We listed my cell phone number there. We put the same ad on craigslist for free, listing Mimi’s cell number there.
Mimi got a couple spam text messages from agents seeking our listing, but no calls from serious buyers. I got three calls Tuesday, the first day the ad listed. Two were interested in something on the first floor. We are on the second floor with no elevator. The third Tuesday caller didn’t care about stairs and wanted to come take a look in the afternoon. He came back a couple hours later with his wife and in-laws. By Wednesday, we had an offer. It was too low and we countered, $2,000 less than our listed price. They countered with an offer that wasn’t quite what we wanted, but getting close. We decided to think about it overnight.
I got three more callers. One asked for the address and drove by but never called back. Another was looking for a first-floor condo. A third came to look Thursday morning. That couple said they liked the condo but wanted some time to look around (we understood, having looked around many times ourselves). By Thursday afternoon, the couple who looked Tuesday accepted our counter and we were working out the details. By late Thursday afternoon, we had a signed contract.
Now I need to go cancel my ad. Seven days was too long for this newspaper listing.
Update: I got a $33 refund for canceling the last three days of the ad. And got another call today.
The Buttry Diary 
Newspapers produce results. That’s the story we should be telling.
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Newspaper marketing geek here: This result didn’t just happen; it happened because of specific things the newspaper has done over time to enhance its brand equity and value proposition, in this case in real-estate classifieds.
My guess: craigslist has a much harder time in markets where newspapers have made market position and value an ongoing strategic priority instead of just operating under the Field-of-Dreams strategy. Another guess: Newspapers that have ignored strategic marketing have all but lost their classified franchise. I have no hard data to support that, but it would be an interesting theory to study.
Anyway, congratulations on the sale and congrats to the Gaz for whatever it’s done to keep its classifieds. Not an easy trick.
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