House #14: Update

It’s been a while since I’ve given an update on The Pine House…

Last I mentioned, we had a second full-price contract on the house with a buyer who was getting funded through NACA. I’m sure I mentioned it at some point (though I can’t find any posts), but because NACA is so backed up these days, the buyer wasn’t able to get her final loan approval before she needed to deal with some other major expenses, and so she had to drop out of the NACA process.

This was a couple months ago, and since then, the market has slowed tremendously in my area. Between the expiration of the tax credit and the flood of short sales hitting the market, there really aren’t too many buyers on the market for this house. While we’ve gotten about a half dozen walk-throughs in the past two months, we haven’t gotten any other offers.

We’ve marketed the property tremendously, and we’ve gotten LOTS of calls from folks driving by the house, but unfortunately none of them have been anywhere near qualified to buy. In fact, my wife has had to stop showing people the property until they talk to a mortgage broker to save her the time and effort of all the wasted showings she has to do; most don’t bother to call back once they find out they need decent credit and a down-payment to buy a house (how the hell do they think buying a house works?!?!).

While I’m not convinced that price is an issue (remember, we’ve already had two full-priced contracts on this one), we decided to lower the price about $10K. We’ve also offered a $1500 bonus to the agent who brings a buyer to us. So, there are incentives all-around for buyers and agents, but we still haven’t gotten much traction.

All that said, it appears things are slowly starting to pick up again, so I’m hopefully that we’ll get some additional showings soon, and hopefully an offer from an interested buyer. Until, we’re just going to sit back and wait…as we’ve tried pretty much everything else… 🙂