My name is CN and I work as a data scientist in the finance industry currently focused
on healthcare.
I've lived in New York City for 12 years now.
My wife and I actually sold two properties through Hauseit.
The most recent one was a 600 square foot one bedroom co-op in Hell's Kitchen in 2020
and then the earlier one was a 800 square foot two-bedroom co-op in Midtown East in
2018.
Both were gut renovations where my wife did all the design and decorations just as a hobby.
The one bedroom apartment was an investment property and we were planning to sell it after
one year.
Because of the delays from coronavirus we ended up selling that apartment for I guess
after a year and four months.
The two-bedroom was actually the first property that my wife and I purchased together.
We sold it after three years because we had started a family and needed some more space.
I first found out about Hauseit from searching online.
I was looking for a way to list a property without paying full commissions.
So Hauseit has a lot of useful articles online and they seemed very knowledgeable about the
whole process.
We also got more comfortable with Hauseit after scheduling a call and making sure that
there was a human point of contact there as well.
Traditional commission rates at least in New York City are six percent of the purchase
price and three percent of that six percent goes to the seller's broker and three percent
goes to the buyer's broker.
If you value your time more than money I think three percent doesn't seem too much on the
other hand if you're willing to spend the time learning about property sales and being
more hands-on you can save fair amount of money on commission by using Hauseit.
In our case we saved about $40,000 in total.
I should also add though I've been serving on the board of a large co-op building in
New York City for about seven years now and so I have some exposure to the co-op interview
process and building finances which gave me some comfort in not hiring a traditional seller's
broker.
We hired a professional photographer to take pictures of the apartments which I think is
really important.
After listing it through Hauseit we got immediate interest from buyers and the open houses were
well attended for both properties.
So for the one bedroom our list price was $666,000 and after a couple weeks we quickly
realized that we had priced it too high so we lowered it to $625,000 and eventually sold
it for $620,000.
So we got multiple offers once we lowered the asking price and one was an all cash buyer
which didn't actually work out in the end.
We were very lucky though to have dropped our asking price quickly because the coronavirus
had just hit right as we were signing the contract with the eventual buyer for the two
bedroom.
Our asking price was $695,000 and we sold it for $685,000.
Initially we actually got in contract with buyer who didn't have a buyer's broker either
so we would have saved the full six percent in commissions.
Unfortunately the earlier appraisal came in low and so the buyer walked and we ended up
selling it to someone else for a higher price than them.
A lot of things can go wrong in real estate transactions and ultimately it comes down
to having reliable team to help you learn and grow.
We were able to take our own challenges in stride.
I think ultimately how's it helped us sell our properties at prices that we were happy
with.
I would definitely recommend Hauseit to friends and family.
Again I think it comes down to whether you value your time or money more.
The information is all out there and so for us we were thinking you know why not learn
something we enjoy while we're saving money.
My favorite part of the experience was definitely post-closing.
I've had enough experiences where you know now from both buying and selling where things
are out of your control and sometimes they just don't work out.
So when they do work out it almost feels like a bonus.
Looking back the obstacles we ran into were not things that having a traditional broker
necessarily would have solved so for us Hauseit provided us with everything we needed to succeed
and I think the rest comes down to your own hard work and of course good luck.