Money Where Mouth Is - Listed Our House For Sale - Already Frustrated

I'm sitting on a house that is listed at or under market value.  It is in great shape in a nice neighborhood.

Move in ready.  It has been on the market since late april....  some interest.  No real offers.

Sometimes it just takes time.  Our issue is that the location of the neighborhood is not really near anything and there isn't a huge pool of buyers for that location.

Anybody wanna buy a 2600 sq ft house with detached heated and air conditioned 1700 sq ft garage right beside a playground for 180k?  35 miles from pittsburgh pa....

Y'all need to move to the money pit that your taxes disappear into.  It's amazing how many old-timers don't give a E36 M3 about curb appeal as they know their row house will sell for close to and over a million in no time at all.  I live in a neighborhood of half-million tear downs with some serious and I mean serious crime issues.  Not north Baltimore ( hate getting an Uber drop off there ) bad but drug market right outside your house bad none the less.  Cops are way better here though. I've never seen such a lack of pride in a homes appearance when it is worth as much as it is. 

wvumtnbkr said:

Anybody wanna buy a 2600 sq ft house with detached heated and air conditioned 1700 sq ft garage right beside a playground for 180k?  35 miles from pittsburgh pa....

Send me the link, I'll at least share it in case anyone I know is looking. 

wvumtnbkr said:

I'm sitting on a house that is listed at or under market value.  It is in great shape in a nice neighborhood.

 

Move in ready.  It has been on the market since late april....  some interest.  No real offers.

 

Sometimes it just takes time.  Our issue is that the location of the neighborhood is not really near anything and there isn't a huge pool of buyers for that location.

 

Anybody wanna buy a 2600 sq ft house with detached heated and air conditioned 1700 sq ft garage right beside a playground for 180k?  35 miles from pittsburgh pa....

 Zip code ? Rental potential? 

wvumtnbkr said:

 

Anybody wanna buy a 2600 sq ft house with detached heated and air conditioned 1700 sq ft garage right beside a playground for 180k?  35 miles from pittsburgh pa....

That sounds custom made for Paul Danner of YouTube fame.  

I talked with my mortgage guy: 

As others said, refinancing and buying new at the same time would be a bad idea. Too expensive, little benefit to rate reduction. 

However, if we decided to bail on the new house and keep our existing house, we could go from 4.8% to 3.8% or less. That might make the house more profitable to rent later on, in the event it doesn't sell. 

So would turning the house into a rental be part of an overall financial plan, or more a case of becoming an accidental landlord?

I've been the latter, and I didn't like it that much, especially as I ended up feeding the property money every month. If you do want to build wealth by becoming a landlord I'd put the building blocks into place first (refi, make the property as tenant-proof as you can), if not I'd sell it, period. There's always a buyer out there, but it might be for a price you don't care for much.

One other thing - when we sold our last house, the realtor was doing a decent job funneling people to the house and working on the subsequent negotiations, but we still had to do a fair amount of selling of the house ourselves during the showings. My wife handled almost all the showings and I credit her with presenting the house well while not glossing over some of the issues we knew about.

That might how our realtor worked, but I've seen this a fair few times with seller's agents as well.

Something else we did that seems to have helped immensely (including the trades, 'cause it cost me something like 8k-10k to get the repairs done) was to get our own home inspection first and address the most important issues and disclose the rest. That built a lot of confidence that we weren't trying to sell a "quick sale (before it falls apart)" type house.

Around here, home owners are not present, when it is being shown. Buyers agent, makes appointment, home owners leave property, and buyers agent shows the house. 

In reply to mr2s2000elise :

That was the same when we looked at houses out here, but back in NV it was pretty normal for us to be present and show the buyers and their agent around.

Boost_Crazy said:tgage.

That 1% rule sounds WAY off. At 1% per month, rent would be 30% higher than what the mortgage on the house would be, buying it with no money down. I don’t think there are many places in the country where you could charge 1% of the value of a home in monthly rent. Maybe it’s a .5% rule? That works out much more realistically at today’s interest rates. 

 

We have two rentals, both bought the traditional way in the last 5 years.  Both are comfortably over the 1% income to value target.

Yea I can't charge $3,000 for this house. 

.65% would be about range. 

pheller said:

Yea I can't charge $3,000 for this house. 

.65% would be about range. 

Yeah, it's not even close to being a financially viable rental. Either stay, or sell it and move on.

It's also worth considering that if you sell the house now or in the future, any profit would be tax free (up to $500k) as long as it's been your primary residence for 2 of the last 5 years. If you keep it as a rental for more than 4 years you'd lose the 2/5ths exemption and any profit from an eventual sale would be taxed at long term capital gains rates.

That sucks.  I've been following your situation as I'm in a similar one. I'm about to talk to a realtor about what things *need* to be done to list on the market, but I can definitely see a scenario where my E36 M3bag neighbor makes it really difficult to sell my home.  I'm  probably going to have to take a loss :/

If I keep it financed its possible I can rent at around 1% and still make a killer profit, but that doesn't sit well with me.... still seems borderline from an investment standpoint, esp. when only dealing with a single property (risk).

We had a mid-week showing, which was a surprise. 

They didn't like all the stairs, nor the area of the neighborhood. 

I have a feeling we'll be staying here for awhile.

Good news is, with rates falling we should be able to refinance cheap.

In reply to pheller :

Try not to get too discouraged.  Give it as much time as you can and hopefully you’ll get the offer you’re looking for.

In reply to Cotton :

This. Even with the market being “hot” in the last couple years, I feel like selling in less than a month is the exception and not the rule. At least people are LOOKING at it. 

Could be a whole lot worse (see 08/09.)

My dad sold used cars his whole life, and one of my favorite phrases from the biz was “There’s an ass for every seat!”

Hang in there.

In reply to pheller :

You're getting a constant stream of viewings, that's a good sign.

How long did it take you to sell the last car you sold, and how many timewasters did you have to deal with? Now scale that up to house size.

Something to consider WHEN you get an offer: don’t get offended if you think it is low. Try to see how they’re coming up with that number. 

A little story time: my wife and I bought a house in September 2016 for $345k. We lowballed an offer, $325k, when they were asking $365. It’d been for sale for 3.5 months by the time we made the offer, and they’d started at $400k. The first weekend it was listed they had a cash offer for $360k, and they declined it. Thought it was a lowball offer. Well, 3.5 months later the next offer is ours. 

So they paid 3-4 months interest and taxes, and had to accept $15k less than they would have. Their thinking that they’d be getting a better offer cost them $17k-$25k. 

I keep saying it. Move to D.C. We haven't had a recession since the 90s.

I'm in Fairlawn. The last 'affordable' family friendly neighborhood left. 10 mins from the Mall in light traffic.  Move now or forever hold your peace.  Central to everything.  Overhyped dining scene but so what.  I'd love to see more gearheads in the 'hood rather than 12 O'Clock boys/Donk/uncorked FoxBodies etc. and some of the most dangerous shade-tree mechanics you'll wonder how they're still alive. 

Our thing is we don't want to be patient. We know the house we want, we have a time limit to work with, we don't want to carry two mortgage. 

Our options are: Sell ASAP for a good price, Sell ASAP for a bad price, Rent, Stay. 

We've narrowed our ideals down to option A and D. 

I have absolutely no interest in living in DC. Ever. Unless my job is in my house and it only require that I'm in DC for a few weeks a year. 

Well for anyone that's interested. This is on my block.

An absolute steal for the city proper.  Even if you didn't telecommute, with flex hours in the Feds you can be at work in about 20 mins to everywhere in the city proper.  And people do telecommute here - a lot, but I would suppose it would depend on an individuals career.

You'll never have to worry about your homes value ever again. 

That kind of albatross would kill me.  Life's too short to be stressed out about the one part of your life that is supposed to be your personal sanctuary.  Renting makes a million times more sense if the finances are that much of a burden. 

Not being patient is what caused you to overlook the flaws in this house, you said it yourself in the other thread. Don’t make the same mistake twice. 

Steve_Jones said:

Not being patient is what caused you to overlook the flaws in this house, you said it yourself in the other thread. Don’t make the same mistake twice. 

And this house that you desperately want... it’s not the only one. There will be another you want. 

The flaws in this house were pretty obvious, we just ignored them because we wanted a house, and we didn't want a place that didn't work. Our house, aside from steps, is excellent. My wife could kinda care less about the steps. She likes nice walls, nice paint, nice furnishing, nice kitchen. She sees a 20 year old house as being outdated. 

The new house is more obviously better in the ways we want it to be, and in the way it lacks it's cheap to update. We've spent lots of time in the neighborhood and in the house. Not too worried about that one. 

If anything, the patience aspect is to see if this slowdown in prices continues. At least in my area, it seems like expensive homes are sitting longer and closing for less.