Had a de-motivational conversation with our real estate agent yesterday. On the one hand, we had 4 showings in the last 9 days, so things might appear to be picking up...but 2 of the couples have 'just started' looking, one dismissed the place entirely because we don't have a fenced backyard(the house is placed at the back of the lot...BIG space out front, but no grass behind the house), and the final couple did seem truly interested.
So yay..but we ended the conversation by talking about lowering the price again, which is something my wife and I had already talked about. We bought the house almost 7 years ago for 179,000. We placed it on the market in the middle of last October at 189,000, which was actually less than our agent thought we could get. In March, we dropped to about 183K and then at the beginning of June, we went down to 178,250, which, yeah, is less than we payed for it once upon a time. My new job has a fairly generous relocation assistance package, so even allowing for the fact that we took out a $9,000 loan for new windows, we would have come out ahead varying amounts at any of these prices, plus had wiggle room if someone wanted us to help with closing costs.
Dropping our price to $172,000 removes any kind of buffer we had. The 'barely treading water' we have been doing carrying two residences isn't going to cut it anymore...not with SWMBO's 2004 Subaru Impreza starting to show it's age. As it is, things are going to be tight at closing. My relocation assistance is paid out as reimbursement, meaning we will need to come up with a check for roughly 15K at closing.
I am blessed that we can even afford to do that.
Greed is a horrible thing, and now the 2nd guessing can begin. Like SWMBO said when we talked about lowering the price to this level...if we had priced aggressively at the beginning, and sold 9 months ago...we would be at almost the same point financially as if we had sold at our initial asking price.
Poop. Hind sight is 20/20...at the time, we thought we had priced it good. We had an offer in January at $186,000 that fell through because the buyers couldn't get their loan approved...at that point, things were looking good and we didn't think we NEEDED to be aggressive.
Can't wait for Barry to fix the economy for us....
I don't know how many comps your agent showed you when you listed, but look again and look hard. I'm preparing to enter the buyer's market, and I am amazed by what I can now afford. And I'm talking about a payment well under 500, tax and insurance included! (Having been mortgage/rent free for 4 years, we want something we can manage on one income, just in case.) I know there has been a brief stabilization in several markets, but don't count on it. Foreclosures are sitting everywhere, and more are coming every day. It sucks that this is your competition, and you will almost definitely suffer a financial setback, but you are gainfully employed and in a position to recover. The competition has nothing left to lose. Considering that you keep a "Bug-Out Bag" in case of disaster, you might want to apply that mindset to this issue. I know that sounds negative to the point of paranoia, but the old rules no longer apply. I wish you good luck.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, at this point I'd be asking about what else the agent has sold recently. There's always the chance that the problem lies there & not with the house itself. You can always hit up Dave Ramsey's website and talk to one of his real estate ELPs and see what they have to say.
ReplyDeleteAnd my wife and I have talked about that too. If dropping the price this one last time doesn't work, than quite possibly the problem isn't with the house...I'm just glad I have something non-life threatening to bitch about...
ReplyDelete