A past client called us this spring about his grandparents’ house in Westgate. He asked if we would sit down with his parents.
His grandparents bought 24 Westwood Crescent SW new and moved in in 1960, the year after it was built. They never moved again. His father grew up in that house. Three generations of the family spent time in it. Sixty-six years later it had still never been listed for sale.
His parents were the executors of the estate, which made them our clients.
The house
It was a bungalow, but a big one for its era. Just under 1,400 square feet, two bedrooms up and two down, on a 5,468 square foot lot on a quiet crescent facing green space. Hardwood under the carpet in places.
The part that surprised us was the addition. Someone built it in the mid-1980s on a proper concrete foundation, with its own furnace and its own basement underneath. That is not what you usually find when you go looking at a 1980s addition on a 1950s bungalow. Usually you find a sunroom on piles and a list of problems. This one had been done properly, and it added real square footage and real value.
The rest of the house had been maintained the way people maintained things in that generation. Not renovated. Maintained.
What was inside it
The house was full. Sixty-six years of one family.
His grandfather built a lot of the furniture in that house. His grandmother painted it. Those pieces had been sitting in those rooms longer than most houses in Westgate have had their current owners.
We brought in Tara, of Staged by Tara, who does our staging. Her job was not to empty the place out. It was to thin it down without taking away the reason someone would fall in love with it. There is a version of staging that scrubs a house like this into something anonymous, and it does not work. Buyers can tell. Tara took out enough that a buyer could see the rooms, and left enough that the house still felt like itself.
The family made all the hard calls about what stayed and what did not. We just made sure they were not making those calls on our schedule.
The price
This is the part I would tell another agent about.
The family wanted to list lower. Their reasoning was fair. It was an older home, it had not been updated, and they did not want it sitting.
I pushed for a higher number. Not because of a comparable sale or a formula, but because of what the house actually was. The green space out front, the addition done right, the size of the lot, and the feeling you got walking in the door. Charm is not a line item on a market analysis, but it is real, and buyers pay for it when a house has it.
We listed at $675,000. It sold in one day.
I am not telling you that to make a point about us. One day is not a strategy. It happened because the house was prepared properly first and then priced to what it was worth rather than to what everyone was nervous about. If we had listed where the family first wanted to, it probably would have sold in one day too, and they would have left money on the table.
The listing is still up if you want to see how it showed.
If you are in this position
Most of the calls we get like this come from the grandchild or the adult child, not the owner. A few things that help:
Start before you have to. The families that come out of this well are the ones who talked about it a year early instead of three weeks after a funeral.
Do not renovate on reflex. The instinct is to fix everything. Most of that money does not come back. We went through what actually returns its cost in our guide to renovating before selling in Calgary.
Get the paperwork out of a drawer early. Permits, the Real Property Report, whatever records exist for the furnace and the roof. On a house this age, buyers will ask, and having answers is worth more than you would think.
And if the sale is funding somebody’s next move, look at that next move before you list. We wrote both downsizing in Calgary and rightsizing in Calgary for exactly that conversation.
One more thing
I have sold a lot of houses in Calgary. This one I think about.
A couple bought a house new, raised their kids in it, kept it for sixty-six years, and then the end of it got handed to their grandson’s realtor. He did not have to call us. He did, and that is worth more to me than the commission was.
Selling a home that has been in your family for decades, or helping parents work through the decision? A free home evaluation is the place to start, or get in touch and we will talk through what it actually involves.