Need serious advice house in MD hasn't sold yet - Posted by Chenel Moore

Real Estate Investing
1

Posted by Vic on March 09, 2001 at 19:02:10:

Chenel,

I think you absolutely should do what you said in your last paragraph, if that is what’s stopping the sale.

I would do the work & raise the price. If the market is hot & the house can really sell for 110 or so, then do the work & raise the price.

I had a house that needed work & I tried selling it for a month in it’s present condition. No way was I gonna get a sale this way. Buyers blow everything out of proportion in their own mind when it comes to repairs. Best just to do it & then raise the price.

The avg. buyer doesn’t want to do any repairs, they want the house in good move-in condition. Do this & I bet it’ll sell.

Also, when you do sell, give someone power of attny. so that you don’t have to go back there in person.

Hope this helps,
Vic

2

Need serious advice house in MD hasn’t sold yet - Posted by Chenel Moore

Posted by Chenel Moore on March 09, 2001 at 09:14:04:

OK, I don’t know if anyone remembers but I put my MD house on the market back in July.

Here are the numbers:
From the comps in the area, FMV of the house is 119,900
I had the price at !119,900 but wanted a quick sale (LOL) so I reduced the price to $109,900.

After being on the market for 30 days, I had 3 multiple offers on the house.
The first offer was for $109,900.

The second offer was for $111,900.

The third offer was for $118,900.

Needless to say I went with the 3rd offer. 2 weeks later they have a home inspection. The home inspector ripped the house. Well needless to say, I agreed to fix everything on the buyers list. Well that didn’t help, the buyer was frightened and walked away.

The following week, I had another offer for 111,900. The buyer was pre-approved. However, the buyer couldn’t come up with the money needed to close the deal. I offered to pay his half of the closing, but the lender wouldn’t go for that.

Then we received yet another contract. This one will make you laugh. The buyer had his loan approved. He provided documentation which showed that he had the cash to close (money was coming from his 401K) and my agent spoke with his lender who provided us with documentation that the loan was approved. Well we came into town to close the transaction on a Monday. The closing was supposed to be on Tuesday. The lender said that the loan was not out of underwriting but assured both myself and my agent that everything was o.k. On Thursday, the underwriters flat out rejected his loan. The buyer had a VA foreclosure that had not been discharged.

So there I was in town, having incurred all of the expenses to move my furniture, and to stay in town for 1 week. Plus, my husband had used his vacation to move our stuff.

That was December. We received 1 more offer in January but since we have to disclose everything we have from the home inspections the buyer withdrew her offer.
At the end of January I lowered the price to $99,000. This is basically as far low as I can go and still pay a commission to the agent.

Now we are in March, and my listing agreement with my agent has expired. The agent had a licensed contractor look over the work and the figure comes to $7,000. This includes installing a sump pump in the basement to cure a wet basement and repatching loose roof shingles, installing joist hangers on the back of the house. The contractor is willing to complete his fix up work and take his money out of the closing proceeds when the house sells.

Here is my situation, I want to just dump the house for what I owe and get out of it. I have talked to all of my investor contracts in MD and but they all do major rehabs or flips. Does anyone have any advice?

3

Re: house in MD hasn’t sold yet - Posted by Dave T

Posted by Dave T on March 10, 2001 at 11:01:01:

Where in MD is your property? If in Frederick, Gaithersburg, or Germantown, I may be interested.

4

What about this… - Posted by Rick(CA)

Posted by Rick(CA) on March 09, 2001 at 14:03:45:

Chenel,

What I don’t see from your post is you offering terms, only price. What is your market like there? Is it hot? Is it cold? (not temp wise).

You’ve just become the “motivated seller”. What I might recommend you try and do instead of taking the continued hit from non-performing buyers is try to attract a different breed of buyer. Those that can’t qualify right now, but need a little time.

That means, offer your house on a lease option. Bring your price back up and advertise it as a lease with option to buy. Set the option consideration around 6k (5%) and give a perspective tenant a year to get their finances in order and sell them the house. Since I don’t know your PITI, I can only guess what your paying on your mortgage. Depending on your market, you can get a couple hundred more than that.

If you’re unfamiliar with Lease Options, read the archives or order a course on here quickly.

This might help you out, but I don’t know enough about your financial situation or timing.

5

Re: What about this… - Posted by Chenel Moore_FL

Posted by Chenel Moore_FL on March 09, 2001 at 14:52:08:

Well

We are familiar with lease options and would love to do one on this house. Our financial situation is this, we have been paying the mortgage on this house without living in it or collecting rent. I am not behind on my payments, but nervous about sitting on the house for another couple of months just to sell it.

My price is what I owe into, 91,000. That’s it, we want to get out. Since we live in Florida now, we are not sure how to proceed to do a lease option because we don’t know how to best screen the tenants from here. We are familiar with lease options and how they work, but seem to be working at a location disadvantage.

The payments are 805 (PITI) per month and the FMV for rents in the area are 1000 to 1100 and up. But my agent told us in order to do a credible lease option, we would need to put the $7,000 work into the house to get the sump pump etc. If I do that then I don’t have a cushion to support the property.

If I could find an investor who is willing to do a lease option on it, I would gladly walk away as I don’t want to be worried about the house anymore.

Is the market hot there?? I am told by all the real estate agents who work there and want my listing that it is still hot and there is no reason why my house shouldn’t have sold by now. When I lived there 6 months ago the market was hot. But I don’t know how the recent economy has affected sales. I am told by all the agents to do the work and raise the price back to $119,900. Even agents who I call just to fish out say that the market is hot. Who knows, like you said, if I lived there, I wouldn’t have posted this. But I guess I just need to figure out things to work in our best interest. That has got to be a positive from all of this.