Skip to footer

How to sell a house? Five reasons to auction it.

5. Auction allows you to take control and move on with your life

Business Wire/File
The kitchen of this Eclectic, Ala., home, which went up for auction two years ago, features Viking appliances, 14-foot ceilings, and top-of-the-line amenities.

  • By Pam McKissick Contributor

Maybe you’ve day-traded rather than pay a stock broker, bought a car through the Internet and skipped the dealership, paid bills online and avoided the line at the post office, self-published to speed distribution, or downloaded movies on your laptop and skipped the cable guy. You don’t rely on experts and middlemen the way you did a decade ago, and neither do most people.

All kinds of properties are up for auction. We’re listing condos in Hawaii, a "McMansion" in Virginia, nine-and-a-half miles of coastline in Baja, Calif., a five-star resort in New England, a penthouse in Milwaukee, a villa in Italy, and family homes in neighborhoods all across America. These sellers don’t think of auction as a distress selling method but as the express selling method.

People want to enjoy their real estate and not be held hostage by it. Buying on the day you’re ready, and selling on the day you select, makes sense for a growing number of sellers.

– Pam McKissick is chief executive officer of Williams,Williams & McKissick, and its premier real estate auction firm Williams & Williams based in Tulsa, Okla. Her latest book is "Auction Your Home? Absolutely!"

5 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.