2836 Happy birthday GreatScott!!

Hope you have a lovely day... ours is half way over but yours is only yet to start... :)

All the best!

Thank you so much for your very thoughtful Birthday wishes, and even taking the time to make a thread for me. I feel so fortunate to have met so many wonderful new friends here on the Italy forum. I feel such a kinship with others that adore Italy as much as we do :)

All the excellent advice and different points of view on so many different subjects relating to moving and living in Italy have been just fantastic! The stressful time we've spent selling our house has been tempered by the huge amount of invaluable information we've learned, thank you to all!

I couldn't have received a better Birthday present :D

Just wanted to add our birthday wishes to those of other forum members.
All the stress of your house sale will just melt away once you get here. We speak from experience as it took us nearly two years to sell our Uk house, long story!! Do you have a moving date yet?

Thank you for the Birthday wishes DavidandLinda :)

Without getting into the gory details, there has been an agent who has wanted our home for herself to retire to. Unbeknownst to us, she was fending off other local agents (with her position as a realtor) from showing our house hoping to get us to sell it to her for under market value. We have now discovered this activity, she's out of the picture, and now we are having lot's of showings and interest from others. Things are looking promising...I don't hear the sound of a bubble bursting ...LOL :)

[QUOTE=greatscott]
Without getting into the gory details..........[/QUOTE]

Goodness gracious me!!
Puts some of the Italian dirty dealing into the shade!

Onwards and upwards for you now, thankfully :D

Best wishes, Lesley & Brian

[QUOTE=greatscott]

Without getting into the gory details, there has been an agent who has wanted our home for herself to retire to.

What a nasty selfish person and the cause of so much stress to yourselves!

Best Wishes for a peaceful and stress free move now that issue is sorted.

Thanks for the wonderful good wishes.

I went back and read what I posted on "Housetrapped in Italy". We just thought that the local agents weren't showing each others properties, so for a month we had the house for sale by owner. Luckily we found the right agent who did the research on what was happening, as she couldn't believe we hadn't sold our house yet. She not only cleaned up the mess, she has done excellent marketing and is bringing in lots of potential buyers. She has renewed our faith in good ethical agents.

Just for fun this is what I wrote (when we didn't know what was happening) on Dec 13th 2005:

[COLOR="Blue"]"Things could go full circle, meaning that the sellers and the buyers might become so disenchanted with the agents, that the sellers go back to selling on their own to the buyers. This is exactly what is happening in California. We are now selling our home by ourselves, picking our own real estate attorney, escrow manager and mortgage company. We can pass a huge savings on to the potential buyers.The last 4 homes that sold near us were sold by owners."

"What's happened here is that prices have gone up and agents are not working well together. They are not bringing potential clients to the homes of their competition (which would mean splitting the commission 3% and 3%)."[/COLOR]

I just wanted to post this because if it could happen to us, it could happen to someone else. I had no idea this kind of thing could be going on. The good thing is that it wasn't not selling because there was something wrong with it, rather it was so nice, someone was trying to keep it for themselves (and try to find a way to drive the price down).

I just read this funny article about real estate in LA from the UK Telegraph. It sort of explains what a zoo it is trying to sell our home here, LOL!
[url]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/05/whollywood05.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/03/05/ixworld.html[/url]