How One Family Waits for Their House to Sell

For over a year now my family has had our house for sale. Although we changed all our realtor told us to in order to sell the house, it hasn't sold. We know it's not our fault. It's just the market with like town homes in our area.

Right now there are maybe 10 other town homes in our neighborhood for sale, and we just can't compete with their price listings, since most of them are either foreclosures or people desperately needing to sell their house. We are not desperate yet, so we can't afford to lose money on our sale. So we wait.

One of our neighbors has had their house for sale most of the time we've had ours for sale. Their house is very similar to ours, except they have a bay window and air conditioning and we do not. My family was sure the neighbors' house would sell right away or at least before ours last year because of their extra features, but it didn't. Finally they took their house off the market to update a few areas and try to sell it easier - which is exactly what we did last year before putting our house for sale.

When I first called our realtor to list our house as for sale, she had oh-so-many suggestions for us to get our house ready. Although painful for our budget, we followed all of her advice, including hiring a painter to paint the entire interior all one neutral color, replacing all the carpet with new and lighter-colored carpet, replacing the dated brown interior doors with new white-paneled ones, getting an interior decorator's advice on how to arrange our furniture, putting away all the clutter. We did all of that, and our house still didn't sell.

We've reached a point where we need to either lower our sale price or take the house off the market for a better market time. Since we can't afford to lower our sale price significantly, we can't compete with 90% of the competition. It's just a bad time to be selling a town home in our area. And it has been a bad time for a couple of years now it seems.

Of course we could rent the house out, but one never knows what kinds of renters would move in; they could tear up the place and then we'd have to fix it all up again. We have decided not to take that risk right now. Maybe later.

While we decide what to do, we're living in a house that is for sale. Maybe we won't change the price at all and leave it for sale and hope someone falls in love with our house and just has to have it.

Whatever we decide, we trust that one day our house will sell. For now: at least we get to live in a nicer, more-up-to-date house than we did a year and a half ago - all thanks to our realtor!