Dear Potential Home “Seller”
Dear potential home “seller,” I call you a potential “seller” because you can’t really be considered that until you get out of your delusional state and SELL your home to somebody. You, sir, have sold nothing. And really, it has been about a year since you have been trying to sell. Your house has been on the market over 175 days this go-round, and it was on the market for a long time before you pulled it off to make some last-ditch efforts at improvement last time. I hope those mortgage payments and tax bills are treating you well because with your actions, it would seem that not only are we at an impasse, but you are not going to see the end of those bills for a long time coming.
I know you bought the house three years ago for $250,000 and common sense would seem to indicate that maybe it would be worth more now, but you can’t just count on it. First of all, this is the Cleveland area. Maybe real estate prices boomed in tons of markets around the country in the last five years, but not here in the suburbs of Cleveland. This is a buyer’s market. Maybe your realtor should have told you that in the nearly 365 days that your house has been sitting vacant on the market, unloved and unsold.
Speaking of unloved, this is another reason why your house has gained nothing in value since 2003. YOU DIDN’T UPGRADE ANYTHING EXCEPT THE KITCHEN. Your work in the kitchen was nice, and I am sure it was an improvement over what was there before, but you did a half-assed job. You replaced the floors, oven, refrigerator, counters and kitchen sink. Congrats on that, but while you had the counters out of there, you might have wanted to replace the older, chipping cabinets sitting underneath. Some might say that you gold-plated a pile of dung.
And you had some good buyers in us. You had buyers who had the vision to get that house where it needed to be. We were able to look past the scratched, bubbling, crappy tile in the laundry room. We were able to look past the pink painted walls and burgundy/pink wall to wall carpeting in the dining and living rooms. (Yes, I said Burgundy/Pink) We were able to look past the mold-stained tile ceiling in the bathroom. We were able to look past all the windows with broken seals; the siding that had mold and moss growing on it; the driveway which will eventually be nothing more than a pile of black, flaking asphalt dust.
So, I am sorry that we will be unable to strike a deal, but maybe you should think harder about what you have and what you want for it next time. We weren’t trying to insult you, but you were definitely trying to insult us. We made our offer of $250,000 knowing that the house needs about $40,000 - $50,000 worth of work. At maximum, when the house is done properly, I think it could be worth between $300,000 and $325,000. So, when you listed it for $299,000 I thought you were a bit delusional, but I respected your tactic. At least maybe we could have met somewhere in the middle until you slapped us in the face with your counter-offer of $298,000. Dropping $1000 off of your asking price sends a message that you could have sent more tactfully and politely with two letters in a simple word.
N and O. That’s all you had to do. Just say no.
If I didn’t feel badly for wasting my realtor’s time, I would ask her to submit an offer for $240,000 just to flip you the real-estate bird. But I won’t waste my time.
In the meantime, I hope the house continues to sit and you eventually have to take even less than our offer for your house. Oh, and those mortgage and tax bills should just keep coming, and coming, and coming and coming…
Call me (groveling) if you need a bail out.
Sincerely,
FilteringCraig
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There is a curious breed of folks you encounter in residential real estate, both as buyers and as sellers. I call them the Lazy Windfall People. As buyers, their approach is to make lots of ridiculously low bids on lots of houses, hoping someone is desperate enough to take them up on it. As sellers, they list their houses for unrealistic money and let them sit there, hoping someone will fall in love or go temporarily insane. I’ve encountered these strange people every time I’ve listed or looked for a house. Very often the houses are For Sale By Owner. I’ve even met realtors who fall into this category, offering much lower commission rates and urging low listing prices, just so they can get a quick hit and move on. It’s just one segment of the market. I don’t know if it works, but people sure seem to do it a lot.
I never bid with flat numbers like $250,000…I always throw some odd ball figure out like…$259,800 which is actually 20% less than asking price.
Well, if I were he, I might think that my offer was one of these low trolling offers, except that we put up 400 bucks for an inspection to back up basically everything we were saying. We presented this copied material to them as well.
Who knows. Maybe we will talk to him in another 175 days.
Also, it’s not clear to me that their counter was intended to insult you. It may have been intended to mean “We acknowledge your bid, and we’re willing to engage in some back and forth, but you’re way out of the range we’re willing to consider.” Granted, it would have been nice if they just came out and said that, but it’s not like you included your rationale with your low bid. Unless you did, in which case, yes, they were trying to insult you.
Way back in the proverbial day, we ended up buying a house in a negotiation that started very similarly. We loved the house, and my research suggested that it was worth about $50K more than the asking price. I also knew that the seller had another, much more expensive, house under agreement, and that deal was due to close in a few days. I thought they might be desperate, so I offered about 80% of asking. They made a similar counter…either $1K or $5K under asking, and told us we weren’t in the ballpark. I countered with something closer to 90% of asking and they accepted.
We explained our rationale, and even offered a 20-day cash close so they wouldn’t have to wait the standard 60-90 days for their money. I thought that was worth something too. Apparently, not enough.
for $250K you can have a very nice house built. If you were willing to put another $50K into it, then for $300K you can have a very nice house built on a nice chunk of land.
New construction is kind of a ripoff, but you get exactly what you want AND a 1 year warranty. 15 years if its anything structural. maybe 30… i forget.
Other than that, check the For Sale by Owner listings. My parents purchased a doozie of a house in Gates for $250K, put ~ $50-$60 into it and its worth over $400K because of the land. I don’t know if you’re looking for land, a big house, a big house on land or what, but the value of land in this area is going up faster than the value of 40 year old homes.
I agree…40 year olds have little to no value!
We make good doorstops, though.