Frustrating home selling update page 8

[VillageMama]

It took us 13 months to sell a house in Michigan and we dealt with our share of loonies. At one point we were actually asked to commit bank fraud.

I know how it feels to have deals fall through at the last minute. I'm sorry that you're going through this. I feel certain that the right buyer is just around the corner for you.

Hang in there, hon!

 

[Lisa loves Pooh]

Well, they walked. I don't know why yet. Only thing I've heard is that "they changed their mind."

Maybe they did find another house? But as of 11:30 this am I had a signed contract from them that was just awaiting my DH's (who is on a plane) signature.

I really did work hard to make this work even though it was a crazy frustrating process.

Which is funny because I really wouldn't have taken the paint. I worry about my own karma too much for that.

Back to square one.

That's a bummer.

When we signed our contract--we were told that there was a way out even after it was signed due to something that I forgot the term.

 

[SandrA9810]

I'm surprised they didn't offer the pre approval letters before even seeing the houses.

My aunt wanted to purchase a house, and take advantage of the tax credit. And when I first started talking to a realtor, he asked if she had a pre approval letter from the bank. He doesn't even like to show houses without it. More or less so he's not wasting his time on some one who can't get a loan.
With so many houses in forclosure, I know the banks all require the letter when putting in an offer.

So either their realtor is a real looney or not smart enough to be in the business.

At least with bank owned, it's kind of the sellers market out there right now. So many people wanting to get the tax credit. One house I looked at, had 16 bids 4 days after going on the market. It was a nice house for the square footage, but needed a little bit of work and a new kitchen. And at 16 bids, they were well above asking price.

 

[Feralpeg]

I had a similar experience several years ago selling my home. The couple were first time buyers. They seemed very nice. We had the inspection and a few minor things showed up. I had them fixed immediately. All was well, or so it seemed.

I packed for the move, put in a change of address, set up to have the utilities shut off at the old house and turned on at the new house and arranged for a moving company. Two days before the closing, they changed their minds. No explanation. Unfortunately, it had taken awhile to get this contract and the builder for my new house was not willing to wait for me to find another buyer. I lost the new house.

The biggest pain was unpacking everything, calling all the utility companies and the companies to which I had turned in the change of address. Due to the layout of the house I thought I was buying, I'd even sold some of my furniture.

I told my agent that I wanted their earnest money since none of this was my fault and I had gone to a lot of trouble. They refused to sign the document for the title company to turn the money over to me. I finally sent a notice that I was filing in small claims court. That did the trick and I got their $1000. I'd have preferred my new house.

 

[golfgal]

He isn't a minister from California by any chance? When my Dad and Stepmom moved from California they had a nightmare couple looking at their house too. They had put in an offer contingent on an inspection, which is reasonable. Well, they had an inspector, plumber, electrician, structural engeneer, landscaper, you name it, come out and "inspect" the house. My parents came home one evening to find the couple there with their agent with a flashlight checking around all the doors and windows to make sure the caulk didn't have any gaps. The house was 3 years old. They had the lock box taken off the door and gave the couple 24 hours to remove the inspection contingency or they were canceling the contract. The couple eventually bought the house.

Radio--if they do come back with any more silly offers, counter with one that is 20% OVER asking price.

 

[RadioNate]

We are under contract, buying a house in Florida. Fearing that all those dire news predictions of the house prices falling more have made us be more aggressive in offering less on the house. We are paying 5% less than the asking price, but feel we very possibly could lose 10% equity in the first year. That is a hard pill to swallow for buyers! We do know that we plan to live in the house for at least 10 years so the downturn has time to correct itself before we would sell again: but, some people don't have that luxury. We are military (husband will retire) but we would not buy a house in this market if we were staying in the service. 4 years is not long enough to get out and break even!

I wish you luck in selling your house!

Mary

I understand that FL is brutal. We've lost nearly 25% of our value since we bought. That is all real dollars.

What was frustrating is that all our comps are short sales and foreclosures and we are priced with them, which is too be expected. But we are paying real money to close. Yes we put 20% down but we've gotta cover the other 5% and then the agents fees in cash.

5k to a buyer over 30 years is nothing. 5k can break my ability to come with cash to closing.

When that happens we become a short sale and we've been trying to avoid that for a few reasons.

These people were only putting 5% down. I was coming to the table with 7x the amount of cash they were and that doesn't factor in the money we put down.

There comes a point that it becomes counter productive to the buyer to try to nickel and dime the seller.

I don't think they had the money to close. My 1st buyer couldn't get financing at all.

Oh well. If they come back Monday...my offer will be higher and a 1 time take it or leave it deal.

 

[surfgirl]

We just went through it... I took all the extra matching tile (enough for me to use in my new basement bath), all the paint (I may use some of the colors again, so I'm using them as swatches), etc.

Their inspector was WHACKED! He tried to tell them that we had a dangerous loose wire that would electrocute someone... turns out the grounding wire outside was disconnected and IF you worked on the electrical box it wasn't grounded. very minor. He told them many bad things about our stucco and was trying to hold us to a code from 2009 when the house was built in 2004. don't think so. He told them flashing, etc. wasn't there when we could see it. I ended up throwing expert builders and contractors at the buyers to assure them it was okay.

One side note I'll add: We did rent it for a year (which I hated for all those reasons you mention)... however, we were able to depreciate it during that time. When we finally sold it below our basis, we took the loss as a ordinary loss (top line off income) since it was previously a 'business'. While it doesn't compensate for the loss, the fact that I'm getting a serious tax refund this year makes it more palatable.

good luck!

(btw, I agree that something was fishy. I'm not convinced that their realtor was telling them everything going on or they weren't approved. If they had money to build an in-ground pool, they weren't at their true bottom line.)

 

[simba20]

That's what it sounds like to me now too. It is standard practice to have a pre-approval for the purchase amount faxed from the lender. It sounds like their agent didn't explain the process to them very clearly.

Good luck with selling your home. I hope you get some good buyers (with a good agent) soon!!!

Our agent asked us to provide this when we made our offer. Of ocurse we used the sneaky tatic of having our loan officer adress the letter stating that we had been pre-approved for the amount we werew offering (and nott he auctual amount we were approved for -- a few thousand more). Anayway, we included it when we wrote our offer and faxed it with everything so the sellers/sellers bank did not have to ask.

 

[simba20]

I'm surprised they didn't offer the pre approval letters before even seeing the houses.

Our agent took us at our word. Of course we had gone to the bank and gotten pre-approved on a Monday and were out looking two days later on Wednesday.

Of course, I never would have gone out looking at houses without knowing what amount to look for. Not even would I have done a pre-qualification, I wanted a SPECIFIC amount. We set our limit for $5,000 over our pre-approved amount, knowing we could alwys try to obtain a reasonable low ball offer. But I told our realator to show us houses in a wide range of prices, for far more less than our pre-approval amount so I could compare.

The house we put an offer on, was $1,000 under our limit, and we offered $10,000 less than the lisitng price. Our offer was accepted.

 

[SandrA9810]

RadioNate: If your house is 4 bedrooms and in orlando... might be something worth looking at...
My aunt is hating all the bank owned homes, and very very few seem to be owned homes. And she's willing to pay more for something move in ready.

 

[manning]

If I had an offer to buy that met all the conditions I wanted I would have immediately signed it.

It then becomes the binding contract. With that you can force the sale.

 

[krnlmustrd]

100 days on the market is a pretty long time. Is it possible that you are over-valuing your property? Especially if, as you pointed out, the neighboring properties are all short sale or foreclosure. That tends to devalue the neighborhood. As a current buyer myself, I can say that I would have been leery of a house in such a neighborhood.

You also seem to be under the impression that you held the bargaining chips in regard to the 4/30 deadline for the home buying tax credit. I think, however, that the opposite may be true. The buyer, even at this late point in the game, isn't going to have that hard of a time getting under contract because the sellers know that they only have a few more days to take advantage of those buyers. Once that 4/30 deadline passes, you will have A LOT SMALLER pool from which to find a buyer. Those who could buy would have done so already to take advantage of the tax credit. Those who haven't are either going to be not-so-serious or less able. This is going to drive down selling prices even more.

And I'm not sure why you are upset that the buyers want to verify that you have the financial ability to sell your house. (Not necessarily verify that you can go lower in price.) If you aren't going to be able to come up with the money needed to pay off the mortgage, then they can't buy your house and will be out all the time and money they put into their end of the sale. And after all the time has passed, they may have lost out on the tax credit by that point as well.

The advice my realtor is giving her clients - which I tend to agree with - is to take the hit on the selling side if you have to so that you can take advantage of the better deal on the buying side while you can - especially if you're buying up and may be able to take advantage of the $6500 credit. She also says, don't negotiate the sale of your home (especially in this market) with a pre-conceived notion of your bottom line. Once you have a buyer, you work them.

My case in point: We were interested in a house that, by design, had a limited buyer pool. And it was over-priced. After five months on the market, the seller lowered the price from 350k to 270k. Still over-priced in our opinion (note how the seller was too blinded by her emotional involvement in the house to realize this.) We offered 248k which we thought was fair even though we should have offered even less. She countered us at 260k which allowed us to walk away from the deal which was fortunate for us since we found our dream home in the meantime. The realtor says the seller was really hoping we would have countered, but it was too bad for her. She risked us walking away when she didn't accept our offer.

We ended up under contract on our dream house soon thereafter. They wanted 475k which again we felt - and we had comps to back it up - that this house, again with a limited buyer pool, was over-priced. We offered 410k with a 10k concession and after SEVEN rounds of negotiation ended up at 433k with 7k concession. If this seller had countered one more time, we would have walked away. The price was our limit. Even though it was our dream house, we weren't going to over-pay for it. Why should anybody over-pay for a house in this market?

On another note, I know that there was some flak given to HGTV on this thread. Let me tell you that I LOVE those home buying shows and highly recommend them. Another identical condo in my building has been on the market for months at a price lower than mine. We took bits and pieces of advice from all of those shows and staged our apartment quite nicely in my opinion. It took a lot of effort, but it was worth it because we had a contract after ONE day on the market. And at only 1% under asking with no concessions.

Lastly, I would point out that you'll need to check your contract about what is and isn't included in the sale as the ones I've seen specifically mention light bulbs. Of course... I don't believe it specifically states that the bulbs have to be working...

 

[OceanAnnie]

We just went through it... I took all the extra matching tile (enough for me to use in my new basement bath), all the paint (I may use some of the colors again, so I'm using them as swatches), etc.

Their inspector was WHACKED! He tried to tell them that we had a dangerous loose wire that would electrocute someone... turns out the grounding wire outside was disconnected and IF you worked on the electrical box it wasn't grounded. very minor. He told them many bad things about our stucco and was trying to hold us to a code from 2009 when the house was built in 2004. don't think so. He told them flashing, etc. wasn't there when we could see it. I ended up throwing expert builders and contractors at the buyers to assure them it was okay.

One side note I'll add: We did rent it for a year (which I hated for all those reasons you mention)... however, we were able to depreciate it during that time. When we finally sold it below our basis, we took the loss as a ordinary loss (top line off income) since it was previously a 'business'. While it doesn't compensate for the loss, the fact that I'm getting a serious tax refund this year makes it more palatable.

good luck!

(btw, I agree that something was fishy. I'm not convinced that their realtor was telling them everything going on or they weren't approved. If they had money to build an in-ground pool, they weren't at their true bottom line.)

I agree.

Have you considered renting the house for a year or so and then putting it back on the market? I would do that before taking a huge loss. Some people think rentals have a stigma to them, I didn't find that to be the case at all. It was different economic times for me, but I would still do it today if I were in your position.