This video is another in the series we have named The Madrona Group Success Stories.

In this video Jason Fox interviews his partner Joe Kiser about a time he listed a home in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle and how he helped his clients choose the best offer.

This sale was an estate sale and there were six siblings involved in the decision making.

Find out why Joe recommended that they not take the highest offer.

Find out how much your home is worth with our instant home valuation tool.

Today I'm gonna interview Joe Kiser 00:01 about a time he took the lead as a 00:02 listing agent for a family of six 00:04 siblings and how he helped them choose between multiple offers

00:06 Joe tell us a little 00:11 bit about this family.

All right well 00:13 all six siblings were raised 00:15 in this home they were all adults now 00:17 some would moved out of state. They had 00:20 this home in their family since 00:23 the 40's.  They needed to sell it 00:26 to fund their mom's long-term care who 00:28 was living in the home unassisted at the 00:30 time and they were gonna put her in 00:32 different care.

It sounds like 00:34 there's a lot of emotion involved.

There really 00:36 was, and everyone has a 00:38 different emotional take to what's going 00:40 on.

Tell us a little about about the 00:42 house and where it's located.

It was a 00:43 really cute house in Loyal Heights 00:45 which is a very hot part of Ballard a very 00:49 family centered area. A neighborhood with 00:51 a lot of a lot of character and charm.

It sounds like it was probably gonna be in 00:56 pretty high demand.

It was. The lot 00:58 was fairly big and the house was 01:01 really small. There's a lot of 01:03 demand being in that neighborhood 01:04 and a lot of demand from builders to 01:06 develop that neighborhood.

Yeah I was 01:08 gonna say uh builders.

That was 01:10 part of the mix here.

All right so 01:13 you put it on market how did it go?

Like you'd expect we had multiple 01:18 offers. It was at the beginning of the 01:20 of when the market was starting to heat up, so if it came 01:22 on today we probably would have had even more 01:24 offers.  I think they ended up 01:25 somewhere around 8 offers on this home.

That's a good problem to have.

It's a 01:30 great problem, it is stressful but it's a 01:32 great problem.

Now we got 01:34 six siblings all trying to make a 01:36 decision on a family home and you got 01:39 eight different offers to choose from so 01:41 first of all how did you present all 01:44 those offers?

I started by explaining to my sellers 01:47 that there's two things that need to 01:48 happen here, one obviously is we want as much 01:50 money as we can get for your family home 01:52 it's gonna be the best for your 01:53 long-term care and all of that. Secondly we need this to close.

Did you boil it down to the top two or three offers to help choose between multiple offers?

Yeah there's always a couple that stand 02:02 out, whether it's communication from the 02:04 agent so you just feel comfortable, the 02:07 terms, lack of contingencies, types of 02:11 financing. There's always a couple 02:13 that stand out so we can get 02:15 rid of a couple real quick.

I 02:17 know we always put them in a 02:19 spreadsheet where we document everything 02:21 and can really go down and weigh 02:23 out the pros and cons and share the 02:26 different values to the seller.

Yeah.

What did 02:29 you come up with?

One thing to 02:31 consider was they lived in the 02:33 neighborhood for a long time, they were an 02:34 established family and they had some 02:35 personal commitment to the neighborhood 02:37 and their neighbors. For them 02:40 they really wanted to have somebody that 02:41 was going to appreciate the integrity of 02:42 the neighborhood.

That kind of thing 02:43 matters?

It did matter to some of them. 02:45 Some of the parties just 02:48 wanted the highest net dollar. We had to look at both of those on 02:51 the emotional and the practical side.  One 02:54 of the offers that threw a curveball to 02:55 everybody came in at the last minute and 02:58 it was just, "I will beat any other offer by 03:01 X amount of dollars cash".

That sounds like your investor?

Yeah that 03:07 that was a builder. 03:09 I knew a couple things instantly; one 03:11 is this guy had never even seen this 03:13 property he was just running a radius search 03:15 and in a certain area that he wants to 03:16 build in.  Two, they were just throwing blind 03:19 offers out on those places. It 03:21 had the square footage that the Builder 03:22 wanted but he hadn't seen it and when 03:25 you go in there and start working with 03:26 the city and tying up places you might 03:29 find that you can't build all three 03:30 units you can only go two.  Now it's 03:32 not gonna pencil out for the Builder.

Then it ends up not closing 03:36 and back to market. We have days on 03:39 market our buyer pools diminish, a lot of 03:42 things could really go wrong while tied up. 03:44

Yeah on the practicality 03:45 side of things, also if you 03:47 think about the sellers and their initial 03:49 need you know they have tied up a place 03:51 for their mother to go and be taken care 03:53 of. If they don't have the money to 03:55 fund that now what happens? That place 03:56 gets rented out to somebody else and 03:59 they're all back to square one. We had a 04:01 young couple that 04:02 wrote a letter and that doesn't always work, 04:04 it worked with some of the siblings and 04:06 not the others. What was really nice 04:08 to see is it they had 04:11 put a lot of money down, they had family 04:15 members that were helping them come up 04:16 with a large down payment so we knew 04:18 there was a real commitment there. Their 04:20 lender called me early on so I knew the 04:23 whole  scenario.

You felt 04:25 really good about that deal?

We did!  You 04:27 know they'd come to the place several 04:28 times and they had waived their inspection. 04:31 Given that the difference in amount that 04:34 the builder was gonna spend to tie 04:36 this place up it really brought on more 04:39 risk than it did reward.

What was 04:41 the final outcome?

The final outcome 04:43 was that there's some new happy 04:45 homeowners that we're able to maintain 04:46 the integrity and the charm of the 04:49 community.

Awesome! And 04:51 were all six sellers ultimately 04:53 pretty happy?

Everybody was happy!

Don't forget to visit us at 05:02 www.themadronagroup.com 05:03 [Music]