Her house hadn’t sold in a year: what nobody had looked at

Published with the client’s consent. The case and its outcome are real.

A year, and nobody to tell her why

Jacqueline called me on a friend’s advice. Her house had been on the market for a year, several brokers had come and gone, and none of them had been able to explain to her what was holding it up.

That is what struck me, more than the length of time. A year happens; some properties are unusual and need time. But spending a year without anyone telling you why is something else. I don’t know what was tried before me and I’m not going to guess. What I do know is that the cause of the deadlock had never been named in front of her.

Because a property that doesn’t sell always sends a signal. The job is to read it.

Three minutes in the entrance hall

I went to see the house. The diagnosis did not take me half a day: the essentials were there in the first three minutes, before I had even left the entrance hall.

First you need to know where this house came from. It had been renovated a few years earlier by an architect, who lived in it. The work was good, and I said so plainly. But the living areas bore his taste, a very strong one, the kind you allow yourself when you design for yourself. Nothing irreversible, nothing ruinous. You simply need some imagination to picture yourself there past someone else’s taste.

And despite this renovation, from the entrance onwards you could spot a series of small things left unfinished. The kind you stop seeing when you live there. Nothing serious and nothing expensive: two Saturdays for a reasonably handy DIYer. But a buyer sees every one of them, and adds them up.

It was the combination of the two that was blocking the sale, and nobody had named it. A family arrives, sees what hasn’t been finished, learns that the house was renovated by an architect, and wonders what awaits them behind the walls. The doubt slides towards the roof, the wiring, the insulation. It wasn’t founded: the renovation had been done well. It was legitimate, and nobody takes that kind of risk with their money.

That is the whole treachery of small defects: they cost almost nothing to fix, and a great deal to leave.

Four reasons, and only one that everyone talks about

Price almost always comes up in the discussion, but rarely from the owner. It is usually me who puts it on the table, once the comparables have been gone through and the documents read, and sometimes the bank has already established it before me when assessing the property. It is often one of the reasons for the deadlock. It is practically never the only one.

One thing needs saying on this subject, because it explains a lot of stalled sales: a property launched well above the market is then very hard to bring back to reality. Buyers read each successive reduction as an admission of a problem, and the seller, meanwhile, has had time to get used to the first figure. Bringing that price back down then takes more work than if it had been right from the start.

Price, first. Not the price as an absolute figure, but what it is the price of. I have seen properties advertised at the price they would be worth once renovated, when they still needed renovating. The figure wasn’t absurd, it was simply that of a different property: the same one once renovated, after CHF 100,000 of work. As long as the listing describes a house that doesn’t exist yet, buyers struggle to recognise themselves in it.

The file, next. A buyer who has to ask for the plans, the energy certificate (CECB), the actual floor areas or the condominium accounts eventually loses interest, or worse, assumes something is being hidden from them. The silence of an incomplete file quickly fills up with the worst assumption.

The buyer profile. This is the most neglected factor, and often the most decisive. A property is not for everyone. A house with a steep staircase and a demanding garden does not sell to the same person as a single-storey home with a terrace, even at the same price. Presenting a property to the wrong category of buyers means showing lots of people round without ever meeting the one who will say yes.

Listing fatigue, finally. A listing that lingers loses value on its own. On the property portals, a home advertised for months is read as one nobody wanted, and buyers start negotiating before they have even visited. I know of no public statistic that sets the length of time after which this happens, and I am wary of anyone who quotes one. But exposure that drags on ends up changing the way the property is received, and not in your favour.

Before relaunching: look behind you

There is one check that nobody does and that can prove costly. When several professionals have followed one another on a property, you need to know what their mandates said and which buyers each of them had already introduced.

The reason fits in one line of law: the broker is entitled to his fee as soon as the information he provided or the negotiation he conducted leads to the conclusion of the contract (Swiss Code of Obligations, CO, art. 413 para. 1). So what counts is not who held the mandate on the day of signing, but which activity actually led to the sale. A buyer introduced months earlier by a colleague may remain tied to him, and another broker stepping in meanwhile does not make that question go away. It is the kind of issue you would rather deal with before the sale than after.

Withdraw, and stay silent for a few weeks

The reflex, after months without an offer, is to lower the price. Sometimes you have to. But lowering the price of a poorly presented property means paying for a problem you haven’t identified, and there is no going back on it.

What I suggest in these situations is less comfortable: we take the listings down and publish nothing for a few weeks, usually a month to a month and a half. This is my way of working, not a market rule, and it first means checking what the current mandate provides. For a seller who has already been waiting a year, the idea seems absurd. It isn’t, because those weeks are not lost, they are put to use.

During that time, we rebuild everything: proper photos, publishable plans, floor areas checked against the dimensions on the plans, the CECB, the technical documents, quotes for the works mentioned. We also rework the value from scratch, keeping it clearly separate from the asking price, which remains the owner’s decision, and is acknowledged as such.

And we answer the question nobody had asked: who is going to buy this property? Not a vague category, a precise profile, with what they are looking for and what will make them hesitate. The whole presentation follows from that answer.

When the property comes back on the market, it comes back new, with a complete file and a clear story. Buyers who had seen it go by don’t recognise it, and that is exactly the point.

A sentence I never say

“You let the right buyer slip away.” It is sometimes true. It is never useful, and nobody can do anything with it. An owner who has been waiting for a year doesn’t need to be told what they should have done, they need to know what to do now.

Two paths, only one to choose

I put it to her simply. Two options, not three.

The first: invest a little before putting the house back on the market. Go over the details one by one, tone down what was too personal in the living areas. A few thousand francs and a few weeks, to finally speak to a family without giving them reasons to hesitate.

The second: touch nothing, and deliberately go looking for the buyer this house had been waiting for. A building tradesman, or a skilled DIYer, who sees these defects for what they are, in other words a list of jobs he knows how to do, and who draws from them not worry but an argument. With, in return, a light negotiation to accept.

She chose the second.

How it ended

The house sold to a building tradesman, at exactly the price I had estimated, after the light negotiation we had anticipated. That is the outcome of this particular case, not a guarantee I extend to the next ones.

I point this out because they are two separate things, and the second matters as much as the first. Getting the value of a property right is valuation work. Knowing who will come and buy it is what determines the whole sales strategy: the photos, the text, the channels, the way viewings are run.

Everyone could see the small defects, and the architect had hidden his taste from no one. What nobody had done was connect the two to understand what they told a buyer together, and then say it to this lady without sugar-coating it. It was that diagnosis that unblocked the sale, not a price cut.

Is your property not selling?

If your house or flat has been on the market for several months without a serious offer, the first thing to do is not to lower the price, it is to understand why. I go through the file with you and tell you what I see, on La Côte, in Terre-Sainte and around Lake Geneva.

It starts with a free valuation of your property as part of a sales mandate.

And if you are on the other side, and a property interests you precisely because it has been lingering for months, the useful question is what is blocking it, before you make an offer. That is the work described on the Buying advice page.