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Tammy and Mike Wright had long planned to sell their Henrico home before retiring to Lake Gaston, a vacation spot on the Virginia-North Carolina border
So as their youngest child was graduating high school, they met with a few real estate agents who assured the couple the home would sell quickly. The encouraging feedback gave Mike and Tammy an idea.
“After talking to them, if it's going to sell that quick, why don't we just try to sell it ourselves?” Tammy says.
A sale-by-owner arrangement was familiar territory for the couple who had bought and sold homes before using those types of transactions.
They plunked “For Sale” signs outside their home, listed it for $549,000 on Zillow, and announced on Facebook that the house was on the market.
Mark Cipolletti, who went to high school with Tammy, learned on Facebook that the home was available and reached out to her. Mark offered to hold an open house for the couple and to list the home on the MLS if they were unable to find a buyer themselves.
After a couple of weeks, the house had generated some interest, but that didn’t translate into an offer matching their asking price.
"Mark is extremely good at his job,” Tammy says. “He knows how to market the home."
“We got some low-ball offers,” Tammy says. “They just wanted to get a deal.”
One potential buyer suggested their $549,000 asking price was too high. But that sentiment proved to be wrong.
The Wrights decided it was time to make a change and brought in Mark as their realtor for the sale. Mark fired up his marketing machine creating professional photos, a video house tour, social media ads and posting the listing on the local MLS and all the major real estate websites like Zillow and realtor.com. He listed the home on the Friday of Mother’s Day weekend for $565,000 and set up an open house for the very next day.
“He had already booked tons of appointments, and tons of people came to the open house,” Tammy says. “All our neighbors were texting us saying ‘you would not believe the amount of people at your house.’”
Tammy also got good news from Mark as the weekend progressed.
“He’s like ‘you’re going to have a really great Mother’s Day,” Tammy says.
About a dozen offers came in over that weekend. Tammy and Mike ultimately sold the house for $658,800 — almost $94,000 over what they had been asking and a whopping $133,000 over the best offer they had received when they tried to sell it themselves.
“I was surprised about how much we got for the house,” Tammy says. “I was thrilled that it did happen that quickly.”
Tammy says it was a “super smooth” process to sell their home through Mark.
“Mark is extremely good at his job,” Tammy says. “He knows how to market the home. He knows how to put it out there. He's thought through the whole buying and selling process.”
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