Liberté!

It’s been a harrowing six weeks, but I’m back to being a single-property owner. On the advice of my amazing real estate agent, I put my Virginia house on the market the first week of June, & we closed yesterday.

I can’t tell you what a relief it is—even having it rented for most of the past year, & even having allegedly professional property managers allegedly managing it, there’s always a strain to check on what’s really happening, rattle cages because they’ve messed up, worry about repairs, etc. I’m not good at being a nag & I especially don’t like being one to people whose job it is to manage all the bits & pieces.

It’s an odd market. As late as April my agent (Craig Lilly, of Prudential) was advising me that if I didn’t have to sell, I shouldn’t. I mean, a year ago Northern Virginia was the vortex of foreclosures & short sales. Even Fairfax County, the champ of inflated property assessments, devalued my house this year by about 30%.

But for some reason, in May, when I checked again, he told me that things seemed to be picking up & I decided to go ahead & see if I could sell. Initially we talked about a price in the low-$200s, but by the end of May he came back again & said that he thought that was too low, & we went for about $30K more. So that’s what we did.

&, blow me if I didn’t get an offer about two days after the sign went up on the property. Not full, but close; & of course that bloody "seller's subsidy" that benights the Virginia real estate market.

There was the usual back-&-forth on repairs & a serious glitch at the end when the electronic appraisals didn’t match the human one, & they had to be reconciled. But papers were signed yesterday & I don’t have to worry any more about two homeowners’ associations, the paint police, the Clampetts living across the way & the rest of that Old Dominion nonsense.

I have to say that I wouldn’t be a realtor for quids—Craig managed the sitting tenants, the contracts, the repair estimates & the repairs; all I had to do was sign about a gazillion papers & ask a few questions. It was as close to painless as you can get in anything involving real estate.

I do miss Virginia, & that house was really good to me. But since I’m in Pacific North-hell, I have to focus on here now. Perhaps it’s appropriate that it ended on Bastille Day.

& major props to Craig!