Local real estate market

Our realtor (he's from the city) listed a house for sale here in our little town a couple of months ago. It's just down the road from us about half mile on the main street through town. First off, there is one realtor here in town and it appears just about every body uses them. We actually met the realtor who works for them on our first trip over here. We saw a house for sale (our realtor wasn't available on that short notice) and since it was her listing, she showed it to us. We weren't too impressed with her and we've seen their ads and such. Not very professional, etc. The locals all seem to use them, the "out of towners" who live in the area don't. LOL. 

The house our realtor listed actually sold Spring of last year, just as we started looking. Our realtor said the people that bought it (from out of town) are getting divorced and were selling it already. It was kind of a cute little house, but it had kind of turned into a dump since they bought it. Well, he sold it already for $163,500. He emailed me this morning about it and said "so we should be able to get a bit more out of your place ;)".  We are hoping we can actually make a little money off this place, especially the upgrades we did with the fencing and insulating the shop. Real estate is a lot slower out here, than in the city, but the market and housing values in the city are going up quite a bit, which will have somewhat of an affect out here. It's still within somewhat of a commute distance (45 minutes) and if people can't afford the homes in the city they move outwards. I saw a nice little new construction house for sale ad. A little bit bigger house, on same size lot, but no extra shop like we have: $440,000 in the city! Crazy.  There are some new small homes being built in a little subdivision about halfway between here and the city. They are asking over $200k for those. If we could make a little on this that would be awesome to go towards our new house down payment. We'll have our paid for land as the down, but anything we can add to it would be even better.  The also good news is it didn't take long for that house to sell. There are some homes around here that take a year or two years to sell! We shouldn't have that problem. The house we are in sold in a couple of months (first buyers lost financing) and then we came along the next month.

I had emailed him about a month ago to ask him if next time he was out this way (since he had the listing) he wanted to stop by and take some outside photos now of our house...because next Spring it won't be all flowers bloomed and green grass (probably will still be snow on the ground). He didn't get time last week, when he ran out to pick up his sign and lock box, but said he's coming through this way on the 20th, so will do it then.

We're keeping our fingers crossed it will all work out for us.