An unrecorded easement on the driveway nearly killed my first $3.72M listing
Background so the numbers make sense. I've done eleven deals, average price around $410k, and I've been stuck at that ceiling for two years. This one came from a seller whose sister I sold a townhouse to in 2022. 5,900 square feet on 4 acres, older money, deferred maintenance in places that mattered and none of the places that showed.
How it went:
Listed at $3.895M after arguing the seller down from $4.4M. My case was three trades in the segment over eighteen months, none above $3.9M, and one of them 11% under its own list after 190 days. He didn't like it and signed anyway.
List side 2.5%. Offered 2% to the buyer side in the listing agreement, disclosed in writing, and one buyer's agent asked for 2.5% and got told no by the seller, not by me. I'd braced for that fight and it took four minutes.
Marketing: $11,400 total, seller paid. Photography and a short film at $4,800, print piece $2,100, two broker events at $3,200, the rest miscellaneous. I proposed $26k of spend and the seller cut it. He was right on the print and wrong on the events, which produced the eventual buyer's agent.
68 days to contract at $3.72M, so 4.5% under list. Closed 41 days after that.
The part that nearly broke it. The house sits at the end of a shared gravel drive over a neighboring parcel. Everyone had used it for forty years. The easement had been written in 1978 and, as far as anyone could find, never recorded, and recording practice and what a court will do with long use varies by state, so I'm not going to pretend I know the general rule. Title flagged it at day 14 of escrow. The buyer's counsel wanted it cured before closing. Curing it meant getting a signature from a neighbor who was in assisted living and whose son initially said no on principle.
What fixed it: the seller's attorney drafted a confirmatory easement, my seller paid $6,000 toward a survey the neighbor had wanted for years anyway, and the son signed on day 33. Three weeks of escrow where I was doing nothing but chase a signature. If he'd held out we'd have gone back to market in November with a story attached.
My gross was $93,000 on the list side, and my split at the time was 70/30, so $65,100 to me before tax and before the $2,900 I spent out of pocket on things I didn't ask the seller to cover.
What I'd keep: the comp argument on day one, in writing, with the 190-day listing shown as a chart. It made every later price conversation shorter. What I'd change: I'd have pulled title before we launched. At this price the property-specific problems are older and weirder than anything I've seen at $400k, and I found this one at the worst possible moment.