Luckily, in real estate, expired doesn’t mean dead.
When you list your house with a Realtor, you generally have a listing contract term of 6-12 months. Once that term is over, your contract expires. Many Realtors watch for homes to expire to pursue those sellers for new business. Often, if your phone number is NOT on the Do Not call list, you will get a few calls from various Realtors the day after your house expires from the market.
If your listing expires, you have the option to stay with the same agent you have been using, look for a new one or take your house off the market. When I get a call about an expired listing, I help the sellers try to figure out why their house didn’t sell the first time. Perhaps it was priced too high, perhaps their agent didn’t tell tham that it smells like cigarette smoke. Maybe they would have benefitted from better photos, additional advertising, or something else that had been overlooked. I see listings with no photos, or no description sometimes, and those sellers don’t know that they are misssing out. Maybe it just wasn’t the right time, the agent did a great job but the market was to blame. It happens.
One time, when calling listings that had expired, I encountered an angry seller. That’s not uncommon. You have just wasted 6 months with your house listed, cleaned up for showings and evacuated for an hour or 2 at a time. It’s a pain in the butt, and for what? After 6 months with no offer, sellers sometimes get angry at agents.
I was taken aback at first, but then I realized that this woman was not angry at me, just the process. I can understand that. I now count that angry (awesome) woman as a close friend. I did eventually sell her house and help her family build a new one in a gorgeous neighborhood.
So, call me and yell. Tell me how everything went wrong and how frustrating it is. Vent. I get it. Then, we will gracefully move on and work to get your house from expired to SOLD.
[...] I spoke with a woman who told me that she was thinking of putting her house on the market very soon, I was hoping she would call me to list it. Of course, one of the first things I do is research the house. I look at the tax records, the listing history, and the neighborhood comparables. When I looked at the listing history of the home, I saw that the house was listed recently, and had just expired. [...]