Selling a house isn’t easy these days, but one Okotoks house listing knows something we don’t: everyone loves dinosaurs.
The three-bedroom, two-and-half bath, almost 2,500 square foot home at 41 Cimarron Springs Way has caught the internet’s attention with the creative approach to tackling the buyer’s market.
As you flip through the photos, you can’t help but notice the addition of a resident—typically a faux-pas in home listings, but a roaring success in this case.
That’s right, some of the photos feature a Velociraptor (Editor’s note: based on size, the dinosaur pictured is more likely a Utahraptor).
Building off the T-Rex costume trend—most notably, the recent Kentucky Derby race consisting of more than a dozen people in the dinosaur costumes has taken the internet by storm—homeowner, Joy and her husband Larry decided to make their own version.
“That’s the thing, everybody seems to be doing these dinosaur things, but it’s all the T-Rex’s, so ours is a raptor,” said Joy. “We made it just a little bit different, and a little nod to the (Toronto) Raptors down East too, because they had just won.”
Since the house was posted on the Canada Day long weekend, she said they have had over 50,000 views on the listing, and have heard from people as far as St. John's, Newfoundland.
“That’s one of the reasons why we did it. We wanted people to look at our house, and we figured the more people that look at the house, the more it would generate traffic,” she said.
While the summer months are slow for house sales, Joy said they knew the house would stand a better chance if it was memorable.
“I know when I’m looking at houses, I look at hundreds of houses and they blend together (…) You just don’t remember,” she said. “So we’re hoping that we’ll also stick in people’s brain.”
Thus, Larry donned the raptor costume and they got to work becoming the “dinosaur house.”
The listing itself gets in on the fun, with the selling features reading as “a stove with a double oven to cook your brontosaurus burgers with ease” and “raised eating bar easily can seat 4 Raptors,” ending with “Don’t be a fossil, check out this new listing before it goes extinct."
The homeowners have been considering moving within town for years, but Joy said it was a recent school boundary changed that inspired them to do it now.
While interest in the home has been slower than expected, she said they are patient and hope with the start of the school year more interest will be shown.
While the oversupply of homes in the Calgary area has seen a continued decline with fewer new listings coming onto the market, the market still favours the buyer according to the Calgary Real Estate Board’s (CREB) June report.
The amount of oversupply having eased is slowing the decline in prices of homes, according to the report, and the benchmark price of homes in Okotoks is currently at $414,900.
In Okotoks, the report says that sales have remained stable compared to last year, but are still below longer-term averages.
Similarly to Calgary, the Okotoks market is moving towards more balanced conditions as new listings adjusting to the sales prices, which is continuing to push down inventory levels.
“However, it is mostly product priced under $500,000 that is trending towards more balanced conditions,” said CREB chief economist Ann-Marie Lurie in the report.
With the Okotoks home listed at over $500,000, good-humour could just be the ticket to selling an above-market house in a buyer’s market.
“It’s so hard in Okotoks, because we’re in a really difficult price range,” said Joy. “In singles, $500,000, it just seems to be stalling.”
She said they are in an unusual position with their micro-market in Cimarron, with several neighbours’ houses selling for well over $600,000, making their house a good deal for the area.
“We’re just looking for that one special person to come and look at the house and love it as much as we do,” said Joy.
The perks of the house according to the homeowners are the space offered in the kitchen, storage, bedrooms and bathrooms; Joy said they have hosted up to 30 people at a time with no bumping-elbows thanks to the large living space.
However, the biggest benefit, said Joy, is the house is on a corner lot, but without sidewalks—meaning the consequence of having to shovel extra sidewalk that commonly comes with corner lots does not apply.
Additionally, the property comes adorned with five fruit trees: two apples, a cherry tree, and two huckleberry bushes.
