When I was 22 in 1985, I was a ski bum at Copper Mountain in Colorado – and my daily to-do list looked like this: ski, drink beer, ski, drink beer, ski, ski, ski, drink beer, repeat.
If you had a job at the resort, you could ski for free – so I applied to be a waiter at one of the many restaurants. Unfortunately for me, though, Mobile Oil had recently purchased the resort, and they were trying to teach corporate management techniques to a bunch of hippies who ran the resort.
One of their game-changing ideas was to make all applicants take an aptitude test – even if the applicant just wanted to wait tables, drink beer, and ski and drink beer and ski and drink beer and ski. And sadly, I got the highest score they’d ever seen. This is not because I was smart – to be clear; it was because the test was stupidly easy and because the competition was lacking to put it mildly (I am pretty sure I was the only one to take the test sober).
In any case, I was deemed too smart to wait tables, so I was given a job selling ski lessons and timed races. It was a comical disaster because I was so ADHD that I never once balanced my books at the end of the day. Not once. I over-collected money (by accident) every single day.
I am sharing all this because one of the things I remember from that period was the popularity of some new-fangled chemical foot-warmers that had come on the market – and I thought about them last week.
When I was in Texas last week, the temperature was in the high 90s, and the humidity was about 70% – and it was stunningly miserable.
Sidebar warning for husbands: I found out that if a wife gets really hot and sweaty walking through a parking lot, it’s the husband’s fault for not instantly having a fully air-conditioned and cooled-down car nearby. Who knew?
Anyway, it occurred to me that they should have foot-coolers for those really hot days, just like they had foot warmers when I was a ski bum in the 1980s.
And the perfect thing to give anyone cold feet in this market is a house with condition issues.
OK… I am pretty sure this is one of those many times when my lead-in stories are too removed from the points in my blog, but I promise there is some moderately valuable info below 😊
Buyers Will Walk If Condition Isn’t Right
We are seeing more contract cancellations than ever, and the reason is almost always because of condition issues.
Appraisal blogger extraordinaire, Ryan Lundquist, in fact just blogged about this: Buyers Will Walk If Condition Isn’t Right.
Ryan makes the point that buyers expect and demand perfection now for several reasons: (1) Homes are more expensive than ever, fostering high expectations out of the gate; (2) Buyers can’t afford repairs when they are stretched so thin just buying in the first place; and (3) buyers are not worried about walking away from a property because there is now ample alternative inventory available in most markets.
So agents might want to share Ryan’s blog with sellers in order to convince them to spend a few bucks addressing condition issues before they list their properties, given that so much as a smudge on a mirror might give buyers a reason to walk.
Texas buyers might also stuff bad inspection reports in their shoes on hot days, as that will definitely give them cold feet.
