A quick meeting of the minds, exactly as listing agent Blake Delany must have planned it

17 Meeting House Road was priced at a fairly low $1.525 million on February 22nd with a note: “best and final by 2/28 @12N)”, and also, something I haven’t seen often, a pre-listing home inspection posted in the MLS document folder. It’s now under contract.

That pre-listing home inspection makes sense to me in this market. Reviewing it, it was clearly prepared by a neutral, objective inspector, with a number of minor defects noted as would be expected in a house built in 1967, and lots of “satisfactory” ratings for most of the basic house elements. “Satisfactory” is not “excellent”, so not a glowing report, but it does give prospective buyers a pretty good idea of what to expect, and price their bid accordingly without feeling that they’re buying a pig in a poke.

So I like it. In a slow market where houses might linger for months or even a year, a home inspection can become outdated, and so a waste of the homeowner’s money, but in this market, with houses going in days and weeks, the report will remain relevant and something a buyer can rely on (no guarantees run to the buyer in a report paid for by the seller, I presume, but if the report is solidly objective, as this one seems to be, it’s a useful tool). And for the seller expecting or hoping for multiple bids, it reduces the chances of bidders holding back a hundred grand or so as a cautionary reserve for unforeseen conditions.

From the totally irrelevant department, this house used to be owned by the parents of one of my group’s girlfriends, Sally G, a beautiful blond. Her daddy, an airline pilot, bought her a fire engine red Mustang convertible, and it drove us boys crazy that she could zoom around town at mad speeds and when pulled over, sniffle a bit, bat her eyes, and get off, every time. None of the rest of us, especially the football players, thought we could get away with that. These days, who knows?