Category Archives: selling a cottage

Go for the painted version – sell your cottage fast, and it may help with those typos too.

Perhaps because Muskoka experienced more cottage sales in March, April and May 2012 than 2011, more cottages were listed, building something of a buyer’s market here.

Monthly Sales 3 Years (Muskoka Haliburton Association of Realtors)

Although the best way to sell a cottage quickly is to properly price it, there are additional things that can help: improve its condition, de-clutter, keep up with the maintenance, add staging and of course, market it well. There’s one more, ahem … “proven” … tactic that I didn’t know until we were sent a photo from a client of ours.

The Procedure

You can call on some divine intervention for help, but apparently “you have to believe.” As a seller you need to bury a statue of St. Joseph upside-down in the front lawn. Some detail on this at snopes.com.

Wow! In looking into this it’s unbelievable, at least to me, there’s even a st-josephstatue.com where you can buy a St Joseph Home Selling Kit, AND they’re all on sale at the moment – at either a “discount price” or a “super discount price” – how lucky is that?!

St Joseph Home Selling Kit (“nice” version)

A quote from the $9.47 unpainted statue description: “This product is a litle(sic) cheaper than the painted version, but always remember that the help from St Joseph has only to do with your faith in the saint, not what type of items you choose.” Ok, so good for them; there’s little in the way of hard pressure for the up-sell.

St. Joseph may not be the patron saint of spelling – or web typos – but hey, if you spend $3.00 more for the “nice painted statue” at a “super discount price,” it can’t hurt – right?

New neighbours on Lake Joseph

After a fair bit of searching, previews, showings, negotiations, re-started negotiations and then working on and waiting for the close – we can happily announce our new clients friends are in their beautiful Lake Jo cottage!

They have made the quantum leap from a water-access-only cottage to, well … have a look at the pictures below. The property is gorgeous, the build, absolutely superb and we know they have the touch  to make the interior design, true cottage elegance.

We are thrilled to have played a role in what we know will be a wonderful cottage life for the family now, and hopefully for generations to come. Congratulations!

Cottage from driveway.
Cottage from Lake.
Walkway to boathouse.