Move Update (Part II)

My wife and I met with our real estate agents last week to discuss our situation and to plan our next steps in the increasingly long effort to sell our house. If you are a seller, the news on the real estate front has not been good lately. Still, we are in a relatively good position since most of the parameters of our move (timing and so forth) are at our own discretion and the fact that we are moving to an area with lower housing costs offers us some flexibility. That being said, we are starting to get a bit anxious.

The home we are having built north of Austin is now expected to be ready next month, and unless we are willing to give it up and wait for another to be built, we need to sell our current home soon. Hence the meeting with our agents.

When we listed our home a couple months ago, we were sure that it's unique qualities (at least for our neighborhood) would be enough to pull in potential buyers. Unfortunately, the market appears to have tightened more than we thought (something our agents, of course, warned us about) and we have had to consider other options to increase the house's appeal.

So, we've dropped our asking price dramatically (a reduction of over $35,000) and offered a $5,000 bonus to the buying agent (on top of their commission) if we can settle by early next month. We are going to do more opens as well.

So, for now we'll just have to see how it goes. Of course we will reevaluate our approach as needed (in fact, if anybody out there in the blogosphere has any suggestions, let me know in the comments section). Know anybody that wants to buy a house?