Kathy

Big news: We accepted an offer on our Upper West Side apartment, and it was related to the first offer we got.

By related, I mean that the neighbor on one side of us who made the first offer decided later to go in on the deal with the neighbor on the other side who's on the board, and split our apartment to expand theirs.

One will expand from a 2-bedroom, 2-bath to a 3-bedroom, 3-bath, and the other will grow from a studio to a nice one-bedroom.

I shouldn't have scheduled our open house from 10 to 11:30 am this past Sunday; it was early, rainy and not a soul showed up. 

To add insult to injury, StreetEasy had mistakenly taken down my listing on Saturday and sent an email to the people tracking the apartment that it was, wrongly, no longer on the market.

But that's OK.  Why, you ask?

Well, we got a second offer (cash) last week from someone who saw our Upper West Side apartment on April 18, the day of our fourth open house. 

I didn't need to see the couple's bike helmets to know that they had been exercising.  I could feel it in their moist palms as I shook their hands and welcomed them into my home.

It was our third open house and up to that point, no one checking out our Upper West Side studio apartment had made me feel uncomfortable.

The pair sat down on my couch.  The guy put his backpack and water bottle on my coffee table, placed his helmet on the floor, and then leaned back and spread out his arms along the back of the couch.

The Intimidator, the Cold Caller, Debbie Downer and the Partner.  These are the four types of brokers my husband and I have encountered the most since we put our Upper West Side studio on the market.  

Many brokers are a combination of these four types and other brokers wouldn't fit in these groupings at all, but in broad strokes, there are four broker personas that have emerged in the past few weeks.

Well, we got an offer on Easter Sunday, the day of our second open house at our Upper West Side studio apartment , so that concludes this column.  Selling on your own without the help of a broker is quite effortless.  Goodbye.

Oh, if it were only that simple.

Let’s start with the open house:  The relaxed feelings we had going into our second one were markedly different from our anxiety the week before.

It was the night before our first open house, and I sat in front of the computer re-reading the words of the one person who commented on my first post here.

"So the first two open houses are Palm Sunday and Easter?  Not sure about this strategy,” they wrote.

Oops. A classic rookie move to kick off our FSBO adventure.

I tried to think of even one person I knew in New York who went to church and decided that whoever they are, they might still want to come to our open house after Palm Sunday services.