Recently, a Chicago area couple, and distraught homeowners, contacted Kathcon Real Estate looking for solutions to sell their home. They had been unsuccessful in their attempts to sell the home for too long. Their home was an older home and functionally obsolete compared to the newer homes that were recently built in their neighborhood. We determined that the best course of action was to market and sell their property strictly to people who were looking to build a new home in their area and/or neighborhood.

Kathcon Real Estate offers a unique marketing program called RECOUP (Real Estate Commission Options Underwriting Program). Normally under this program, we would simultaneously market the property as a teardown, new home construction, and as a residence in as-is condition. But in this case, we believed that because of the age and functional obsolescence of the home, coupled with recent new construction in the neighborhood, the house would no longer be attractive to a buyer to move in the home, without extensive renovation. So we marketed this property as a new construction tear down property. Within a few weeks, we found the perfect couple that responded to one of our neighborhood mailings that bought the home, but really just bought the land and location, they planned on building a customized home on that property.

Our RECOUP marketing plan provided the financial lubricant to make the deal happen. Providing additional cash to the transaction (nearly $30,000.00),RECOUP allowed the sellers to not only accept a lower price but also gave them additional cash for a down payment on their next home. As a consequence, a new home was built where the buyer got a very good bargain, and the sellers received more cash to make their move while selling an otherwise unsellable house.

That is about as much a “win-win” as a real estate transaction can be.