When Family Calls

I wasn’t the obvious choice.

My brother-in-law’s family is close, the kind of close where holidays are loud and laughter is louder. There are two other realtors in the family, and one of them had already handled several home sales for different family members. So when my phone rang, and it was my brother-in-law asking me to list his house, I was genuinely surprised.

I’ll be honest about something else: his previous home had been sold by a large team out of Newmarket. So was poaching him from that team, not just the other agent in the family.

What made this listing more than just a family favour was the stakes behind it. My brother-in-law had purchased a pre-construction home and needed to pay off a significant chunk of the purchase price by a hard deadline. There were no exit clauses. If the sale didn’t close, he was in serious financial trouble. This wasn’t a casual listing; it was a pressure cooker, and I was just handed the lid.

Selling a Home in Bradford During COVID

This all unfolded in the spring of 2021, right in the thick of COVID shutdowns, lockdowns, and what felt like an endless national debate about everything.

Here’s the thing people forget: COVID was actually remarkable for real estate. Being locked inside your home for months on end made people desperately want a different home. Properties were selling unseen. Bidding wars were routine. It was a seller’s market unlike anything most agents had ever experienced.

But by spring of 2021, the tide was turning.

Inflation was climbing. News anchors were using words like “hyper-inflation” and “the end of quantitative easing.” Homes that would have sold in days were sitting for weeks. Prices weren’t dropping yet, but they weren’t climbing the way they had been either. On every corner you could find someone predicting a crash.

And selling real estate itself had changed completely. No open houses. Restricted showings. Masks and hand sanitizer required at every visit. If anyone involved in a showing tested positive for COVID, the entire process could shut down for a week or two.

That was the market when we listed on Rutherford Rd. The sky hadn’t fallen yet, but it was teetering.

The Strategy Debate

My brother-in-law had a plan, and it was a reasonable one, for the market that existed just a few months earlier.

He wanted to list below the expected value, generate multiple offers, and let the bidding war set a new price ceiling for the street. It had worked for dozens of sellers in Bradford through 2020 and early 2021. He’d watched neighbours do it and walk away with more than they ever expected.

I understood completely. This was his home. He’d worked hard for it, upgraded it beautifully, and he deserved every dollar of its value. I wasn’t going to dismiss his thinking.

But I knew something he didn’t: the strategy of listing low to generate multiples was starting to break down at the top end of the market. And with the expected value of his home, we weren’t going to attract the volume of buyers needed to create a genuine bidding war. Higher-value homes have a smaller buyer pool, and those buyers take longer, often two to three weeks (in that market), before they make a move. List too low, and you don’t attract serious buyers; you attract deal-seekers who want a luxury home at a steep discount.

Rather than argue the point, I proposed something better: we’d try his strategy first, and if it didn’t produce the result we both wanted, we’d switch to mine without drama.

We listed at 89% of the expected value, with offers to be presented seven days later. On offer night, we received four offers, all below asking, and well below the expected value. The low price hadn’t created competition; it had attracted buyers who sensed a bargain and were trying to capitalize on it.

We had our answer. On day eight, we raised the price 12.5% and started over.

How We Sold a Bradford Home Without Open Houses

Repricing solved one problem and created another.

A listing that’s been on the market for a week isn’t fresh anymore. Traffic from Realtor.ca drops sharply after a house has been listed for seven days. Agents who had already seen it weren’t going to suddenly reappear. We needed to find new buyers, and we couldn’t hold an open house to do it.

I tried virtual open houses first. They were, to put it diplomatically, a complete disaster. Nobody wanted to schedule a Zoom call to tour a home. The technology was there; the appetite wasn’t. Most people were annoyed enough to use Zoom for work, it was a necessary evil in their eyes, not something you voluntarily did on the weekend. No one showed up.

So I turned to video.

I’d been reading about American realtors using short-form video to sell properties. TikTok wasn’t something I was willing to touch, and my dancing isn’t good enough to make it worthwhile even if I had been. But Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube were platforms I understood, and I believed video could work there.

I produced a couple of proper video tours of the home, not a shaky walkthrough, but something edited and intentional, cut differently for each platform. The first few days were quiet. Then the second video hit on Instagram around the same time the first one gained traction on YouTube, and things started to move.

By the end of the second week, we had accumulated over 10,000 views across all three platforms. More importantly, I was getting phone calls specifically for “the house in the video.”

YouTube turned out to be the key. It’s the world’s second-largest search engine, and in 2021 almost no Bradford realtors were using it. People searching “home for sale Bradford” were finding our listing organically. We were generating interest without open houses, without an agent caravan, and without the traditional tools the market had shut down.

The showings started coming in.

The Negotiation

The first serious offer came in at 95% of asking, which was 5% below our ask, but within a range I considered workable. We countered at 98.5%. They came up. We held. Eventually, we landed at 97% of asking, and everything stalled.

The buyers wouldn’t move another dollar higher. My brother-in-law wouldn’t move another dollar lower. The deal sat at an impasse that felt, from the outside, completely unresolvable.

I’ve been in negotiations that stall like this before. Sometimes you push. Sometimes you bring new information. Sometimes you find a creative term, a closing date, an inclusion, something that breaks the deadlock.

This time, I did none of those things. And it wasn’t because I was smart enough to know better. I had already used terms to move the deal as far as it had gotten. I had no terms left available to me.

The Phone Call That Changed Everything

My brother-in-law didn’t call me first. He called my wife.

He was stuck, not on the number, but on something deeper. He asked her what she thought his mother would say about selling the house. His mother had loved that home. She had told him never to sell it. And he had never quite made peace with going against her wishes, even after she was gone for over a year.

My wife didn’t tell him what his mother would have said. She told him to ask her himself. In their faith, that’s not a metaphor; you light incense, you pray, and you seek counsel from those who have passed. She told him to do that, and then to call me back when he was ready.

Then she called me. She told me what she’d said to him, and she told me to wait. Don’t call. Don’t push. Don’t negotiate. Just wait. This was something her brother had to do, and no counter-offer in the world was going to move him until he’d done it.

So I waited.

He called me back later that day. He was ready to accept the offer. Whatever had passed between him and his mother that afternoon, I don’t know, and I didn’t ask, but he came back settled and clear, completely free of the weight he’d been carrying through the entire process. A few thousand dollars wasn’t going to stand between him and his future anymore.

I’d like to say I was wise enough to give him that space on my own. I wasn’t. That was my wife. She understood what her brother needed before either of us did, and she taught me something I’ve carried into every difficult negotiation since: sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is nothing, if you’re wise enough to know when.

The sale closed. I can’t tell you the actual price, but it was 97% of asking. The first home on Rutherford Road to ever sell that high. A record that held for nearly a year, and still stands as the third-highest sale on that street today, five years later.

What This Means If You’re Selling in Bradford

The market in 2021 was uncertain. COVID had changed the rules. The traditional tools weren’t available. And yet the result, a street record with no comparable sales to support the price, came down to three things: the right pricing strategy, marketing that reached buyers where they actually were, and the patience to let a negotiation breathe when it needed to.

Those things don’t change with the market. They apply whether rates are rising or falling, whether inventory is tight or abundant, whether we’re in a seller’s market or a buyer’s one.

If you’re thinking about selling your home in Bradford and you want to know exactly how strategy translates into results, I’d be glad to show you.

Michael Bailey, Broker
Century 21 Heritage Group Ltd.
905-716-9017
michael.bailey@century21.ca
soldonbradford.com

The sale of Rutherford Rd closed September 30, 2021. MLS# N5246031. Market data sourced from TRREB Regional Housing Market Tables, Bradford West Gwillimbury, June 2021.

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