Reduce or wait???
 

Opinions needed...House up in VA has been for sale 2 months..Lots of lookers, no offers yet...Realtor thinks its priced too high...Those of you who recently sold up north to move to TV, did you have to take a large reduction in price? Dilemma, do we wait it out hoping the market gets better...or Reduce now and just get out and to our place in TV??? Hard decisions...On the one hand you dont want to "give your house away"...but on the other, keep paying those monthly mortgage payments for another year as you wait??? hmmmm

In the summer of 2008, my husband also said he "didn't want to give the house away" when we recieved an offer after having our house on the market for 8 months. Somehow I, along with our wise agent, convinced him to accept it and we are thanking the dear Lord every day that we did! We closed on Sept. 30th, right before the Oct., 2008 market crash.

The other houses in our neighborhood that were for sale at the same time as ours, are STILL for sale at greatly reduced prices.

Price your house to sell in a down market and get down here asap to start enjoying the rest of your life!!!

what is the feedback from the folks who have looked at the house - are there any reasons other than price that keep people from making an offer? might be that some other issue[s] need to be addressed.

have you checked the comparables within a ten mile radius of your location? is there an independent resource where you can look-up such public records? i never like to rely solely on a realtor...they might claim to work for me - but they are looking to collect their commission, too!

i love the idea i read here a while back - the seller raised the price of the house and used the add'l $$ to pay an added incentive to the realtor who brought in the buyer contract! was much like where i grew up - if the house didn't sell, raise the price - and make sure the agents know the date of the price increase!

good luck with your quest!

Reduce

Get outa Dodge.


.

It's easy to tell someone to sell. One has to look at the comps. in your immediate area. Is your home clutter free? All family photos put away? Have you staged your home for the next buyer? I have always said that once my home is on the mkt. it is no longer mine. Price your home to sell. Does it mean give it away? No. Your realtor should be telling you what to do.

Much luck to you! You live in a beautiful area.

P.S. Remember curb appeal.

It took me 18 months to sell in 06-08; I kept reducing my price, chasing the downward spiral in the housing market. I finally asked my agent.... what price should I set that will get this house sold. We set that value (about 18% less than where I started but still a tidy profit on a 10 yr old house) and we had a viable offer and contract within 2 months.

Everything will sell for a price and only you know what you can bear. As many have said on this board, these years are precious and the sooner you are here to enjoy this lifestyle, the happier you'll be.

Selling your home at market value is not "giving your house away". If you are getting lots of showings but no offers, then your house is overpriced.

I assume your agent has provided a Comparative Market Analysis showing similar homes and their sale prices. You have two choices, either reduce your price or improve your home to bring the price higher. I'm sure your agent has stressed:

No clutter - put anything personal away in boxes
Clean and tidy inside and out
Kitchen and bathrooms bright and shiny
Classical music playing in the background
Cookies baking in the oven, or cinnamon simmering on the stove
Open the blinds and let the sun shine in

Your agent has probably suggested some good ideas .. take down wall paper. Paint brightly coloured rooms a neutral colour.

If you've followed all the suggestions and your home isn't selling, you could try an additional bonus to the selling agent (not the listing agent). But probably the best idea is to reduce the price so that your house is the best deal around.

Then pack your bags and move to TV. I'll betcha in a year you'll be telling people what a great decision you made.

When we put our house on the market in Georgia, at $250K, our agency had an open house for agents only. Their combined response was that we were priced too high. Recommendation was to reduce the price to $199,000. We sold in 2 months for $242,500, no seller closing costs, not repairs or changes wanted. Keep in mind that comps are a reflection of what agents convinced the sellers in your area to market their house at. It has nothing to do with value. If a home does not sell the Agent does not make any money. Now if you are lucky enough to find that one out of fifty agents that is in fact honest, take the advice, but you are more qualified to price your own house if you do proper research. Yes, use comps, but take them lightly. We had two offers at or near $190,000 within weeks, by Rental Investors from Atlanta.

FACTS: According to agents
When you sell, the improvements on your home don't represent value.
When you buy, the same improvements are worth big bucks.

When you buy a house with a pool, it is worth 30K more dollars.
When you sell a house with a pool, it eliminates many buyers.


TRUE FACTS:
Staging is very very important.
Pack away everything that makes the house yours like Pictures/souvenirs.
Less furniture makes the rooms look bigger.
Paint that Red room back to a neutral color.

You just basically have to ask yourself how bad you want to be in TV!... simple as that!

Before our move to TV, a neighbor had their house listed for 599K. Although it took a 38% reduction and 13 months to sell our home, I just noticed in the newspaper, from our previous residence, that the neighbor finally sold their house for 432.5K. About a 28% reduction. Tic tok tic tok

We will be facing a similar dilemna soon and in your area (we are in Providence Forge VA). While we have not yet listed the house (target is September) , we have met with an agent we trust from previous experience and her input is that the market has dropped about $50K in the last 2years in our sell price range. So our approach is that we have figured out what our "minimum" sell price for this house is to get what we want in the Villages, and that value is well within the comps for our house. I do agree with many of the other posts that real estate agents do not always consider the potential market value of a property, but rely way too much on comp prices which may or may not be actual comparable properties. We don't feel comfortable unless we do some checking ourselves, in order to have a solid base to make a decision. But, we know it's not worth what it was, and we have already moved past that point. Our objective is to move to TV, not to sell our house for the absolute most money we can get for it. We are very fortunate not to be in a position to have to do that financially. Good luck with your sale. We might meet in TV sometime and we can compare notes over an adult beverage of choice! We are leaving for a TV visit Friday and will be there most of next week looking at properties, meeting with friends already there, and drinking more Kool-Aid!

Bill and Sue

We sold in CA in 2006, just as the price of housing had dropped. Our agent gave us a realistic price to sell the house for. I wasn't thrilled at first, but realized that my friend had still not sold her house and it had been on the market for a bit. We decluttered, repainted, spruced up the landscaping and the very first people who looked at the house, bought, and at the price we listed it for. Our agent told us we could ask more, but we might just have to wait for a while to get a buyer. House prices were dropping rapidly at that point and waiting might not improve our chances of getting a higher price. Did we want to let a few thousand dollars slow down our opportunity to move forward? Neighbors who lived across the street from us put their house on the market about a year after we moved and they have still not sold that house. The market changed and they were caught in the downward spiral. We still made a great profit, we owned the house for over 30 years. You will have to decide and determine how much you need to get in order to move without too much financial stress. Just remember though, if you don't sell, you still have expenses to deal with and that can diminish some of the "profit" you might get by waiting.

We here are waiting your arrival. Drive safely on your way down.

We have sold properties for a good profit and some for a loss. We are happy we sold each property, and two that were sold at a loss, well, we call that the best money we have ever lost! And we lost real money, not just on paper. Looking back, selling was what we wanted to do, and getting on with life is wonderful. In this market today, I think it is a good thing to sell and move on. IMHO and worth what you paid for the advice. :)

Now, to confuse things, I have heard talk of the home buyers credit coming back. But, do you want to sell now, or wait for something that might not happen to sell your home?

Good luck! Hope to see you soon in TV!

Pat

Thanks to all TVR'S who responded
 

Thanks for all the great advice/opinions, suggestions, was all great...Our agent prepared the feedback sheet from every showing..All of the feedback about the house was great..( Shows beautifully, great house, love the floor plan...) The only negative was the price...sigh...so we will have to reduce. The house is staged, our faimily pics gone, shows well, just needs a price adjustment..We are going to reduce but one worry...Was talking to an appraiser friend and he said they are all SO scared with all their new rules that they tend to appraise most houses low.....ugh***Wouldn'nt it be great if we all had that crystal ball and knew when the market would turn? Sad part is I dont think a lot of folks will ever get back what they have put into their homes .....

Our experience:

We just got a signed contract on our condo in Fairfax. We didn't sell it last year, but rented it out instead because we thought prices might stablize. Unfortunately, they have only gone down more.

I am of the mind that if you don't get offers early but have a reasonable amount of traffic, then more than likely you are priced too high. I tried to bypass this problem by asking our agent to list our condo for less than the others in our complex even though I knew ours had upgraded appliances and wood floors and was spotless, but guess what happened... we received lots of traffic but only one offer which was lower than our asking. After checking the most recently sold units of similar size, etc. we realized that their offer was close. Most of what is selling in our situation were short sales. We had only 1 comp in our very large complex that was a regular sale. We countered and got a signed contract in less than 1 month. We lost over 100k but I have been reading that the market is still in a downward trend and lot more people who have 3 and 5 year ARMS are going to be in trouble soon which means even more foreclosures and short sales. Even though these sales should not affect a regular sale they do, IMO, because the preception of the buyer changes when they see all the LOW prices, no matter what type of sale it is.

You have to know what you can live with, make a decision, and not look back. We figured Ithat we had made $$ in many other sales, so we are not going to waste our time wishing thing were different from what they are. Life is full of opportunities!!!

Good Luck with your decision!

Thanks Julie!
 

I am beginning to think just like you guys..If I thought the market was going to get better in the next couple of years, I would wait, but I dont think thats the case.....We already own our home in TV in Amelia, so that is not the decision maker ,etc...
PS I read your webpage/blog, was great! I think you did a fantastatic job of describing TV!

Sometimes it is wise to pay for an appraisal from the same people that do appraisals for a Mortgage Company. This appraisal can then be used by the buyer when they get their Mortgage. There us usually a transfer fee but much less than what the buyer will pay when they get a mortgage.

Hope that it fits your sales story and you can set it out on the table when the home is being shown and that will address any price issues your buyer might have about price. It will also help you feel comfortable about your sales price. This is a small price to pay for your own comfort and it may help you sell your home.

Remember if you sell your home and the buyer needs a mortgage and your home is appraised for less than the sales price then all bets are off so this is many times a good idea.

We sold our house late last summer in four days. It was listed at about 40K below what we wanted per our brokers recommendation. The first looker made a 100% offer that we accepted. Then we had to drop the price another 12K after it was appraised. This was about 30% below the high market of late 2005 but still 50% more than what we paid ten years earlier.


It is probably now worth 10% less than what we sold it for.

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One way to look at it is that you may get less, but on the other hand you will pay less. It probably just about evens out. If the market goes up and you get more, rest assured that a house in TV will cost more.

Not a hard and fast rule, of course. Just a way of making it more palatable to reduce the selling price of your house so you can get down here.

My wife and I are in the market for a house in TV at present. Some of the pre-owned homes we are looking at cost the sellers 20-30,000 more when they bought 2 or 3 years ago than they are selling them for now. You can look all this up on the tax records at www.sumterpa.com and see what I mean.

Reduce the price!
 

We were in the same dilemma spring of 2009. The realtor encouraged us to lower the price. We considered taking it off the market and waiting until 2010. Glad we didn't, and instead lowered the price. Today, 2010, the market has dropped yet another 5%. We sold our house within several months and are enjoying the good life of retirement.

A house is not a home
 

Your house is only worth what others are willing to pay. If you sell it at what the market price is, you are not giving it away. You can wait for the market to catch up (if it ever does) to the worth of your house in your head but if you do, then the price of what you buy to replace it will have risen accordingly.

We just moved to TV a month ago and had our home on the market for 7 months. We had two failed contracts due to inability to get mortages before we finally sold it. When I put it on the market I priced it at $130,000 less than it sold for two years ago. The current market price of my house had dropped that much. Over the course of the 7 months the market price dropped another $70,000. I followed the market by using Zillow.com to see what they estimated the market price to be and found them to be pretty spot on. When the market kept dropping, so did the selling price of my home. We made a decission to price our home much lower than we originally wanted to and we knew when we hit the magic number when the offers started coming in. At closing I asked what my house had appraised for and was told it was appraised for just $500 above what I sold it for. Did I give it away? No. I sold it for what the market was willing to pay. Even so, I still made a nice 30% profit because I bought it at a very low price just 8 years ago.

In this market you will have a lot of showings but everyone is aware that it is a buyer's market and there are a lot of desperate people out there who HAVE to sell and will lower their prices until they do. Then there are the foreclosures and short sales to compete against. Many buyers are looking for that million dollar home selling for $100K. We found ourselves trying to compete with new, larger and more luxurious homes who kept lowering their prices below ours in a desperate effort to sell. We did what we had to do to sell our home. I still made a nice profit but far from what I thought I would make.

Due to the lower than anticipated price we sold at I have a small mortgage instead of no mortgage but I am at least 7 years away from retirement and living here is well worth it. I would rather live here and work than to live back in NJ and work. We are now enjoying TV with a 70% reduction in our housing cost which is making up some of the difference between my idea of my home's worth and what I actually sold it for.

We are here having a blast while friends back home are still trying to sell because they want their price which they do not seem to be able to justify with any real world numbers. Who is better off? :shrug: We sold our house and found our home!

Vinny, you make alot of excellent points in your post.Help me understand, that you priced the home at $130,000 less than it sold for 2 years ago, but you made a 30% profit because you bought it 8 years ago
:confused: what am i missing.Love your post, you add alot to this message board.

Moved from S Fla. and had the same situation. Take what you can get now. The market will get better, but that may take 5 years or more, and then probably not back to where it was. Our clock is ticking and we only live once so take what you can live with and enjoy the rest of your life here.

Hi wlou,
One more factor to consider is how much it is costing you each month to keep the house you are trying to sell. The mortage interest you continue to pay every month could have gone instead toward selling the house earlier and not making those interest payments.

If you wait another two years to sell your other house, you will be making those house payments for two more years with no guarantee that the market will go up. Many experts do not expect it to.

If I were making up a resolution for you, I might say:

Whereas, you already own your home in Amelia; and
Whereas, you are ready and able to move to Amelia as soon as you sell; and
Whereas it could be costing you as much or more each month to wait out the market as it would cost to reduce the price of your home and sell now; and
Whereas, the market might not recover and then you would make all those additional interest payments and sell low anyway; and
Whereas, life is short and the more time you live it to the fullest the better;
Therefore be it resolved to sell in today's market and COME ON DOWN!

But, I could be wrong.

love it!
 

:laugh:Thanks guys, all the posts are wonderful and we did reduce....Now we wait....

Indy-Guy, We are about to list our house in MA, going round and round, had 3 realtors come in, 50K difference in what the house should list for. As everyone has said here price is everything. We have an appt. Friday for an appraisal with a bank appraiser. Thank you for the suggestion, believe this will give us peace of mind.

What's the point of having a RE agent (at 5-6%) if THEY don't know how to price the market? Heck I could just set a price and keep reducing until it sells. I always hear that you should not sell it yourself since we amateurs price it too high and then it looks like a fire sale when you need to reduce. I'm saving the 6% and price it right from the start when I sell.

But good luck with your sale and see you in TV!

I thought that too. We sold ourselves in CT but in our town there wasn't much inventory. We tried to sell a house in Seattle in 2001 ourselves, and the market was dropping and we had to eventually go with a RE agent. Most people who are serious buyers are working with a RE agent, especially relos. Even if you use one of those flat rate put it in the multilist with 3% to buyers agent guys the realators don't show the house. I guess they disapprove of the practice. They will only show your property if there is no other listings that fit the bill. So my experience is high demand low inventory you are OK to sell it yourself (If you have the skills) High inventory soft market you are in for a long wait for a buyer.

But it does bother me that alot of RE agents have no financial savy, I also end up editing the offer or counter offer because if it isn't in the boiler plate they don't know how to do it. I currently have found an exception to that in our area thank goodness. He not only pulls comps for my house but pulls the overall statistics for the surrounding mile or two and makes a graph to show if prices are falling or rising in our price range. We then use his graph to help with the market value determination. We did this when buying through him and he uses the same process for sellers .

Reply
 

[QUOTE=kentucky blue;271117]Vinny, you make alot of excellent points in your post.Help me understand, that you priced the home at $130,000 less than it sold for 2 years ago, but you made a 30% profit because you bought it 8 years ago
:confused: what am i missing.Love your post, you add alot to this message

Too many meds. :laugh: 2 years ago same homes in our development were sold for $570,000. I put mine on market for $439,999 last September. Sold it 7 months later for $370,000. Bought it 8 years ago for $260,000. Subtract real estate agent commission, closing cost, etc. And i made about 30% I think my math is correct. If not I apologize.

Reason for dramatic increase in value of home is because township bought the farm next to my house and was going make it a golf course. Plans put on hold due to recession but farm zoned for recreational use only.

Real estate agent
 

My wife was my real estate agent and I used to be at one time. You are right about agents not showing homes for sale by owner or low commission unless their client finds the home and wants to see it. Our strategy was to offer an extra 1% to buyer's agent if sold within 30 days. We had no illusions about selling it that quickly but what it did was result in a lot of showings and therefore a lot of agents from different agencies seeing the house. It was not sold in 30 days so we withdrew the extra commission but we had showings every week from the same agents and others who worked with them.

With the end of the first time buyer credit quickly approaching we made the decision to lower the price to an amount we calculated would get more interest. If that did not work we were going to pull it off the market and just stay whet we were. Well we sold it and it appraised right on the nose so I think we did a pretty good job. My agent commission was less due to my wife being my agent so that helped plus i will get my $6500 repeat home buyer credit next year which i would not have gotten if i waited With my greatly reduced cost of living here I will be able to save almost 40% of my salary each year. If I stayed in NJ I would save very little if any.

What credit are you talking about???? My understanding is that credit went away also or did you buy another house right away?

Just sold this month... and will be traveling to TV in a week or so... We did drop our original asking price... (our area is small town USA, and is being hit hard by recession). We dropped about 9% of our beginning asking price... but we are happy with the decision.

Price your house right or be prepared to wait.

Keep in mind the economy will be s-l-o-w in recovery.

House sales in the Villages are unusal. (location,location, location). We sold ours in 3 days.
Other parts of the Friends sold their house in 3 years!

If your real estate agent thinks the price is too high - it IS too high.

I have no idea of how long you have owned your house but chances are even with reducing the price, you will still make a profit. Use that money and buy a nice house in The Villages - hopefully as a re-sale - negotiate the price with the seller and have a fully paid off house with little or no bond.

Amen!
 

We had our house on the market 3 years ago and took it off after 9 months. We relisted it 5 months ago and sold it for 100,000 less than we could have 3 years ago...we were not willing to come down on the price back then. In Atlanta area prices are still falling. We are glad to have finally moved on. As my husband says, "we will look back in a few years and say this was a great decision...or maybe not.". But today is today and that is all we have. You only need to decide if this is what you want. Also, once you have sold your home, it must appraise for that value so you are at the mercy if the market.

Lower the price and get down here. The prices here are rising so the quicker you get here you will save money on this end to make up for loss on the other end in VA.

It seems to me if you have had lots of lookers then price isn't the issue. Our house in VA has been on the market eight months and very people coming to see it until we reduced the price. (We still haven't sold it after dropping the price $100,000.) Is your agent giving you feedback from other agents that are showing your house?
We tend to be pessimistic about the future. I don't think the market will be going back up...most likely going down. So I don't think waiting a year would help. But who knows,
I don't have a crystal ball. Good luck on selling it soon!

and if you have a ton of equity all you are doing is deciding how much you will make on the sale (or not).

If you have the working margin, price it to sell and get to where you want to be.

btk

Every agent and potential buyer will ALWAYS say "the price is to high" I always say that when I look at a house even if I think it is priced fairly. Everyone wants a bargain. So check the comps, look at everything on the market near you, watch what sells and at what price, know and understand "your market" and price your home accordingly.

Redfin.com is a decent tool to track this if they support your area. You can look at what has sold, what is on the market, which homes have open houses, asking vs selling price, etc. Throw out foreclosures as they will skew the numbers. Every home has a price that it will sell at, but you should not give it away either. You may not get what you expect for it, but make sure you do get a fair price.