I know someone who is trying to sell: me! But I’m not necessarily in any rush. I don’t need to get out. I’m in a condo now, and I’d just like to get into something totally my own. I have several friends who are also trying to sell or buy, and since money is so tight, it is hard on both fields to do so. But the economy will improve (especially, I think, if Barack is elected), and overall I think (hope) by the first of next year we’ll be able to look back at this, after having learned from Essentials in Economic Growth 101 in the school of hard knocks.

I buy…I sell…the days blend into weeks. I see some folks dumping. Their loss, especially since there are so many ways to do creative LEGAL financing and deals. I don’t see the more stable banks dumping their REOs here, except for the real junk. The rental market is still there to support well-kept homes under about $150,000 around here. Many are zeroing in on good construction now when they buy, so the iffy put ‘em up in a week builder’s stuff isn’t catching the savvy folks’ eyes as much.
All in all, we are much better off here than in other areas. Looking at a longer history, we are just seeing the rubber band snap back a bit to center. I am worried about the politcos who want to turn the houses and mortgages over to the gov’ment to be recast and redistributed. Few housing authorities are very trustworthy and frugal with the resources we give them.
A long time real dealer tells about her area where the city gives away houses for $1.00. They give them to folks who don’t end up rehabbing them and they sit. Then the city jumps back in with grants and ends up paying multiple times as much as if they would have let private capital buy them for undermarket and fix them up using a smaller budget.
The shell games need to stop, and they need to put those bad lenders into another business instead of letting them walk with their ill-gotten gains. They are already figuring out how to put their worst products back on the market, and they have in many cities. As always…preying on the poorer and uneducated the most.
You gots to give. You gots to take. What else is new?

I have a friend who has been trying to sell a condo downtown for several months and has received one offer for 30% less than he paid. I think this is because of all the job loses downtown. It does not make any sense to live downtown and commute to work in the suburbs. I think the loss of several restaurants has not helped the market. It also looks like Ballpark Village will never get built and that Centene has decided not to come downtown. Too bad, they would have helped.

Slugger (#2)hits on an interesting point. My area tried the one dollar homes concept that fell flat on its face. So now they’ve gone the opposite direction. Oh, you can buy a fixer-upper, but by the time you bring it up to “code” you could have bought a nicer house in a more affluent community. I know a young couple who bought a house around the corner from me and it boggles my mind what updates and improvements the city wants them to complete. Yes, the concrete driveway is cracked–so is everybody else’s!–but it’s not like it’s crumbling into dust. or looks like one of those blacktops gone bad. I mean, that was the whole point in this young couple buying a fixer-upper. They’d do basic work to make the house inhabitable and then make improvements as they went along. The codes are so over-the-top now that even rehabbers are passing up the vacant homes. There’s no way they could do what all the city wants and make a profit! Mind you, I’m not anti-code. If the city would have set up reasonable codes of maintenance all along, some of these properties wouldn’t have reached such a deplorable state! But, oh no, let it all go to hell and then expect somebody with a bottomless wallet to come along and clean it up. In today’s housing market? Are you kidding me???

We discussed this very topic here a month of so ago. The Fish’s are optimistic about the prospects of selling our current house and buying a larger one later this spring or early summer. Home prices in our area dropped about 10-15 percent over a year ago but have leveled off in the last 6 months. Several sellers in our neighborhood had to reduce their asking price but were still able to sell well above what they paid. Well maintained and updated homes are still commanding a good price and getting them. Last year it took an average of three months to sell a home. Now they sell in about a month.

My dad has to sell his house right now because he and my step-mom are getting divorced. They have a McMansion in Chesterfield. It doesn’t look too good. He has it listed for the exact price he bought it for, and 3 other houses in their neighborhood sold for $100,000 less than asking price.

We are planning on buying a nicer home in a few years. When the prices dropped, we thought about jumping the gun and buying now in order to save money. But, we have a home that we’d need to sell (and we’d have to pay some money to get it in sellable condition), plus we have some debt. So, we decided to wait a few years - pay off debt and fix what we can before buying the new house. I think prices are going to be low in a few years, anyway.

Irons only gets a year for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars doing bank fraud? LOL He’s lucky he wasn’t caught with an ounce of cannabis doing nobody harm! He’d be in for much longer.
I suspect other than in bubbly areas those who will profit from saying we have housing industry problems are blowing this out of proportion. Figure out who stands to benefit from “crisis” and you may see what is really going on.
If you go on housing forums you will see that those who bought in bubbly areas waiting for a greater fool are very upset right now. They are infighting and completely going nutty over this. But when they expected a big windfall at the expense of someone else’s bank account, they had no probs with prices rising in an unrealistic manner. They need to just let those kinds of folks learn their lesson and help those who were shafted, but try to live within their means.

I sold a large two story home in the Fall of 2006, and it was tough. It languished on the market for 90 days, and we had to drop the price $25,000 to get it sold, as we had already purchased another home in order to down-size. Our Real Estate Agent kept telling us, that “in good times, and with the amount of square footage our house contained, it would have sold instantly”. However, that wasn’t the case, and that was in the Fall of 2006, so I can only imagine the frustration of Sellers in today’s market, who are trying to sell their home at fair market value.

We sold our home early last fall just as the housing market slump was really becoming apparent. Our home had been on the market for three months and we were considering pulling it off and just sitting on it within a day or so of us getting an offer. We negotiated down a little further than we’d prefered, but we knew it was our only shot.

We then purchased a larger, slightly older home that’d been on the market for six months and as the owners had already moved out of state, were willing to bargain. We were able to buy the home just under our cap and stay on budget.

We’d had an ARM on our previous home for a couple of years only because we wanted to get our finances on track and had a plan of selling our home within two years, which we did. We sold our home within a few months of the ARM going up. We are now locked into a standard, conventional mortgage with our new home.

Barring any future crises in the housing market, personally or nationally or plans are to stay here for 5-7 years before making our next step in our long range plans and goals of owning a large tract of land out in the country. Part of our choice in buying our current home was that while still small as compared to our dreams, this near half-acre and large enough home has the potential to suit our needs with accomodations and remodeling if we must put off or forego a farm.