Got the Selling My House Blues

Gone are the days when you could put your house on the market and your Real Estate Agent could guarantee moving your house in 90 days or less. Many homes are staying on the market for months on end. Some agents have developed a new tactic to make a listing look new, as if the house has just come on the market when in fact it may have been listed for up to a year. By simply removing the house and re-listing it, it receives a brand new MLS number and the days on the market are zeroed out to start over. Home owners are pulling out all the stops too. HGTV and TLC have taught us loads about staging a house to show off its best features. Many sellers offer to help with closing costs, offer bonuses to agents who can bring in a viable offer, and many come close to giving their homes away at prices well below the original asking price and sometimes even below the appraised value. The result to the market is disastrous. In Jacksonville Florida, homes valued at $230,000 just two years ago are now appraised at $130,000 which means those folks hope to stay put for a while until our economy recovers. But what happens if your work or your health require you transfer elsewhere? The following two stories illustrate the true state of the housing market in the United States.

Having successfully sold a home in Jacksonville, FL in 2004 we felt very comfortable with the idea of selling our home in Granbury, TX when the need to relocate to Virginia arose last summer. After all, we had a contract in less than 5 days on our house in Florida! We also figured that our Texas home was a superior one to the Florida home. Plus, it is located in a sought after neighborhood. All the stars were aligned! We went right to work neutralizing the house and staging everything from the furniture to the flatware in the kitchen drawers. We brought in the Coldwell Banker agent who had represented us as buyers to help us sell it and she was very pleased with our staging results. Our agent thought that surely this house would not be on the market for more than 90 days. So we hired a friend to look after the house and water the plants and such, packed up a wagon and moved to a rental home in Danville, VA to wait for the house to sell.

Imagine our thrill when within a week she reported that a couple from San Antonio loved our house and thought it was perfect for their family. The trouble was they needed to sell their existing house before they could bring an offer. Our agent declined their contingency offer on our behalf knowing that we could miss out on a sale and be held up for months while they tried to sell. It really pays to get an agent who is willing to act on your behalf as if it was his/her own house to be sold. Two months went by with zero traffic in the house. During our monthly activity report call we asked her how we could increase traffic in the house. Her response was very depressing indeed. No one was getting any traffic. It was not just our house. The last house to sell in that market in our price range closed in October 2008. Several properties have been forced to lower prices once and some twice. But we kept our chins up thinking that once the president was inaugurated things would surely pick up.

After New Years we got another bite, another family with a contingency offer. Our agent sent them packing. We met to discuss our next options since our house had been on the market for six months, she advised us to hold our price, not to lower it yet. Since traffic was increasing in the Granbury market, we agreed. The last week of January another family fell in love with our house. Only this time, they did not have another house to sell. They gave us our first legitimate offer; an offer $10,500 below our asking price. Because our agent had informed us that many people where trying to take advantage of the market and many homeowners had all but given away their properties, we assumed that these buyers started low to haggle our price. We gave them a counter offer that was $5,500 below our asking price. We figured that was a fair haggle, it would only increase their monthly mortgage by $30 or less. To our complete surprise and chagrin, they refused our counter stating that they had offered us their limit, the most they could spend. Our first thought was "Why on earth are you shopping for houses priced $10,000+ above your spending power?" We did the math and determined that our house must sell before August in order for us not to take a hosing over refusing the offer $10k below our asking price.

"When the house sells..." has become a dirge that we sing in tune to the "Song of the Volga Boatmen." We are in limbo, which feels like purgatory, until our house does sell. We cannot shop for a new house - primarily because we refuse to get anyone's hopes up with a contingency offer. We have had to tighten up our budget to the extreme. (Thank God for Dollar Tree!) Everything we do, everything we want, must wait until the house sells. No in-theatre movies, no cable television, no dining out, no anniversary gifts this year, no, no, no! It is very depressing, but the only responsible way to survive having a mortgage in Texas and rent to pay in Virginia, plus utilities in both places. It is like our wallets are hemorrhaging and the only way to stop the deluge is for the house to sell. But before we could sink into a black funk over it, we ran into a close friend of ours while on business in Florida in February. His story made us feel so much better about our situation.

We will change his name to Jeff to preserve his privacy. Jeff owned a lovely waterfront home in the popular Mandarin area of Jacksonville, Florida. Jeff loved his house, but you see, he received a job offer he couldn't refuse from a company in San Antonio, Texas. He put his beloved house on the market and headed west with his faithful hound to start his new job. While waiting for his Florida home to sell, he purchased a newly constructed home in San Antonio. That was some terrific job offer.

After 10 months on the market, the house in Florida was still not sold, so Jeff decided to put it on the rental market. Since he still had family in the area, they offered to check up on the property and collect rents for him. Right away a family moved in and the trouble with being a landlord began - he received telephone calls from his former neighbors for everything from yard mowing boundary disputes to "Why is their teenage son coming over talking to our daughter!?!" Every month the renters were either late or negligent with their rent. Finally, Jeff was forced to resort to legal means to remove them from his house, which they had trashed. Meanwhile in Texas, Jeff's new employer begins feeling the economic crunch and starts laying people off. Now he was unemployed with two hefty mortgages. Unable to find another job in Texas, Jeff decided to return to Florida. He was able to rent the new house in San Antonio to a co-worker and his fiancé for enough to cover that mortgage. Jeff returned home to Florida and resumed living in his old house and found a job right away - you would think things are looking up. But alas, Jeff's co-worker in Texas had a falling out with his fiancé and could not afford the rent on his own and he vacated Jeff's house. So now Jeff is faced with two mortgages again and trying to decide if he should continue to rent the San Antonio house via a real estate agency or bite the bullet and put her up on the block. As he rushes headlong toward bankruptcy, he entertains the idea of letting the house foreclose. This really illustrates the dire straits homeowners are facing in today's market.

If you have a need to move to a new location, the main thing to consider is whether you want to try to sell or rent your existing home. Take into consideration all of the pros and cons of each option. Are you prepared to be a landlord? No? If you decide to sell, and plan to use a licensed real estate agent, work with an agent who takes a personal interest in your needs and will keep you posted on the progress regularly. If you must live in the house until it sells, here are several tips to help you maintain while prospective buyers troop through your home:

CURB APPEAL:
The first impression will determine whether a buyer will get out of the car or when viewing your house online, if they will even schedule a visit. If you have a lawn, keep it trimmed weekly. Sweep entryway and wipe down doors, knockers and knobs weekly also.

STAGING:
Neutralize the house: Clean it all up. Many buyers are put off by a messy house. Pack up personal photos and effects. Potential buyers must be able to visualize themselves living in your home. Spruce up the interior with a fresh coat of neutral colored paint to the walls. Stronger colors should be reserved for accent walls only. Eliminate clutter and unnecessary pieces of furniture. Arrange the remaining pieces of furniture away from the walls. Increase lighting, both natural and electrical. Give each room a purpose. You can get a lot of good staging ideas form your local real estate companies or go online for resources like www.HGTV.com, www.homestaging.com, and www.beautifulstaging.com to name a few..

MAINTAINING THE STAGE DAILY:
Eliminate Clutter: Pick up and put away every evening before you retir
Wipe down table surfaces each evening.
Organize closets and drawers and put everything back where it goes daily.
Vacuum and Mop the whole house two to three times a week
Eliminate cooking and pet odors daily
Keep the dishes washed and the laundry done up.

Our house is still on the market and we are still hopeful of a sale in the next couple of months. Every now and then I go online to www.realtor.com and view the virtual tour to remind myself of all the hard work we put into getting it ready for market. It helps me to hold on until our house selling blues end and we never preface a sentence with "When the house sells..." again.