We put our house on the market when we were looking at the QuikDrop franchise. Fortunately, we weren’t able to get the house sold before both of the QuikDrop stores went out of business. Talk about dodging a bullet! Not only would we have been putting the store into a smaller area, we would have had more competition. I think we would have lost the business within a year. Anyway, I went to visit the Home office in Lincoln to see if we really wanted to purchase a HobbyTown franchise. Everyone was very nice and I was impressed with how nice the stores were and how HobbyTown was planning on growing it’s market. I’ll write another post about the trip later. I would say that the trip was a success and we decided to move forward.
Our current Realtor wasn’t doing much to help us sell the house. We were having quite a few showings, but we weren’t getting any offers. We found out that the listing was wrong, showing that we only had a single floor and the wrong number of bathrooms. To make matters worse, they would re-list our house every few months so it would show up as a new listing. When they would re-list it, they would make the same mistakes and we would have to have them corrected again. Fed up, we called Stacia’s cousin, Jeremy who was a Realtor for a while, and asked him who was a good Realtor. He recommended a Realtor for us and it was night and day from our other Realtor. Although the new Realtor was charging us 3% while the old Realtor was only going to charge us 1%, I guess you get what you pay for. He and his wife suggested a lot of things that we could do to improve the chance of getting the house sold. They also helped us stage the house. I think it was only a month or so before we got an offer for the house that we accepted.
One thing is for sure…. You never really know how much stuff (junk) you have until you pack it up to move. We filled up a 26′ truck and half of another in our move to Idaho Falls. The majority of stuff ended up in three (!!) storage units and the rest of our stuff we took to the place we were renting.