Advice Needed: Selling a House

[Rain Man]

I bought my first condo for about $70,000, and we knew it was a good deal when we bought it. It was in this gorgeous old mansion with a huge yard in a great part of town, and I happened to drive by right when they put them up for sale. I thought it was underpriced, so we jumped on it even though we weren't expecting to buy anything yet and hadn't even been in Denver a year. We actually bought two apartments in the place and combined them into one condo.

When my wife and I found a house we liked about 11 months later, we put the condo up for sale. Our Realtor looked at the place and said, "Oh, hey. I think another Realtor in my office has a client who'll want it. Let's ask $87,000."

The Denver market was really hot at that point, and sure enough, within a day we got an offer for $85,000 from the person, and the condo hadn't even gone on the market yet. We wanted the house so we accepted it, and were quite pleased since we'd owned the condo less than a year.

Two years later our buyer sold it for $140,000. Dang. I think our Realtor underpriced it.