What Housing Slump . . . ??

As mentioned before, the thinkdaddy family has moved from St. Louis, Missouri to the Miami - Ft. Lauderdale area.  I will also mention that moving is a bitch both physically and emotionally.  That said, we got out of our old house really easily.

We put some nice time, effort, and money into making the house "show well" and it paid off.  Thinkmommy and our two girls got on a plane and moved to Florida on a Friday.  I stayed behind took care of typical last minute "stuff."  The house would go on the market when I left to drive our car and "Bob the Dog" down to Florida.

I left Saturday morning and was in the car three hours when the realtor called.  She had an offer on the house.  A damn good offer.  A damn good, non-contingent, cash offer.

We took it.

The house sold in THREE hours.

The best part of it was that we would be able to start looking in earnest for houses in Florida right away so we wouldn't be stuck in a temporary apartment for very long.  Let's ride the "buyer's market" wave.

Well shit . . . I've never seen a bigger bunch of lazy homeowners/sellers and realtors in my life.

The market down here is really bad.  I'd say that more than 75% of the houses we've seen are short sells or foreclosures.  People are really down about the housing situation.  You are constantly hearing on the news about how horribly hard it is to sell a house.  Houses are selling way under their purported value.

Given all of these woes, you would THINK that homeowners would do everything they could to make their houses ready to go.  If someone was ready to buy and had the cash, the owners should be able to say, "Paper or plastic?  Welcome to your new home."

Why then, in the name of friggin' St. Joseph, can people not be bothered to even clean up their houses when they KNOW potential buyers are coming?  Buyers that can lift the burden of these structures off of their swayed backs.  Buyers who really, REALLY want to buy.

Of course, this rant doesn't apply to the foreclosures.  These houses are empty and dirty.  They've essentially been abandoned when their owner's oversized dreams were shattered by the radical (and entirely predictable) increase of their undersized sub-prime, adjustable mortgage payments.

I'm also not talking about general straightening of furniture or vacuuming or "staging" of the house in order to make seem like a nice product.

I'm talking about walking into a house with our realtor and having the owners not even bother to get their asses off of the couch and turn off the basketball game.  I'm talking about not leaving piles of dirty dishes in the sinks and dirty ashtrays on the tables.  I'm talking about maybe postponing washing the dog in the kitchen SINK until AFTER their showing.  I'm talking about maybe not deciding to boil whatever crazy, stinky, vegetable you found at the local farmer's market ten minutes before someone was coming to maybe buy your house.  A house that they don't want to imagine stinking like boiled shit if they ever moved in.

These all happened.  They were all different houses.

I should add that we're not looking small places in questionable neighborhoods.  These are in nice developments with parks, and gates, and guards, and Beaveresque features.

I should also add that we are the IDEAL buyers for todays market.  We are pre-qualified for more than double what we're looking at.  We don't have any contingencies for closing the deal.  We are ready to go NOW!

It makes you wonder if the listing agents should maybe coach their clients a little bit about making their house a bit more appealing.  Guess not.  Today was the kicker -- check this out:

I schlep the two girls on the 30 minute drive up to see a house today that we were really interested in.  It looks GREAT online and meets almost all of our criteria.  I was going to check it out, and if it was good, thinkmommy was going to look at it after work and we'd make an offer tomorrow.  For some reason, listing agents in certain communities want to be there with you when you visit with YOUR agent.  It's a pain in the ass, but a seemingly necessary evil.  I show up today at 2:00pm.  Right on time.  It's getting to be naptime for the girls, but that doesn't matter at the prospect of finding our perfect house.  Our realtor is waiting in the driveway, all is looking good.

Nope . . . the other realtor canceled at the last second.  There was no lockbox on the door because obviously she was the only realtor that could be trusted in an empty home with potential buyers.

From the outside, it was perfect.  Through the windows, it was perfect.  But, I dragged the whole circus up there and that fool woman no-showed on us.

It's from these above citations that I make my ultra non-scientific pronouncement:

50% of the housing slump is caused by lazy, unmotivated homeowners that are enabled by their quasi-inept and equally unmotivated realtors.

Discuss.

Comments

[rev_matt_y]

I put more of the blame on the realtors. We've dealt with realtors who REALLY steered us wrong in terms of comps, pricing, presentation, etc. Of course, I've also looked at houses where the owner was clearly totally unreasonable and/or a complete slob.

[Eli]

I agree wholeheartedly. Most, if not all, of the current economic problems we're having are caused by human stupidity. I've run into similar situations on a smaller scale with cars and other things I've sold. Put a little bit of actual effort in, and you'll be successful.

Great post. Best of luck finding a house!

[Lisa B]

Wow, our agent mandated a long list of stuff we had to do before we listed, down to "Go get a plant and put it here ..." She said I had to scrub the grout on the bathroom floors with a toothbrush (It looks great now!) Of course, we went with an agency that specializes in upscale properties ... our house is near the bottom of what we will list. A lot of the people go with discount "we'll put your house on the MLS for cheap" agencies who don't do any coaching.

I'm also not supposed to ever be in the house when potential buyers come looking. Sometimes I only get a half-hour warning, so I try to keep the place as close to spotless as possible at all times.

I'm really motivated to sell my place, and the real estate crisis has not affected my area (Durham, NC) to speak of. Maybe some people don't bother because they keep hoping something will save them before the house sells? Like maybe they have no idea what they're going to do once the house is gone, so they are forestalling the inevitable until the las possible minute>

[Cam]

I was in Ft. Myers Florida from mid 2003 to late fall 2005. So I went through "all" the hurricanes. Also the housing boom. I bought a 2 BR 2 bath house with a 3 car garage and a pool in Lehigh. I bought it before all the craziness in the real estate started to happen, for around 130k.

I had a standard fixed rate loan (100%), because I was planning to stay in SWF. I should have got a interest only loan. I only stayed one year, and sold it for 220k. Wilma actually went through between the time I sold it and the time it closed.

I was not a native of SWF and wanted to get back home to Indiana. Florida is great for vacations but living there wasn't really working for us with small kids and so on.

We sold our home to a nice guy from CT and had $239k on it. We had the craziest realtor in Lehigh working for us, and he was nearly 100% responsible for the near 99% inflation of real estate prices in Lehigh in one year timeframe.

A couple months after we left the bubble burst so loud we heard it from Indiana. This agents office collapsed and he laid nearly everyone off, and he has since sold it (for what I don't know) and left for Tennessee, the next big boom. No doubt he's doing well, crazy realtors always do, don't they?

I have no doubt that many people in SWF have a way too casual attitude about showing houses. These houses may be leftovers from the bubble. They've probably had them listed for well over a year if not two years+ and no longer care, "just another showing"

When the bubble was going gangbusters during that last year, everyone was cashing in. The big thing in the office where I worked was getting home equity lines of credit and using it to buy cars, harleys, boats, other houses and flipping them, so on.

We engineered systems for buildings and one of the project managers for a high rise condo we worked on bought a unit pre-construction for $150k and sold it "at the table" when the building was released for occupancy for $600k+. Not to shabby! Now, I don't know if the people that bought it were intending to flip it themselves or not. There were investment groups buying up units like crazy, flipping them, cashing in. Eventually condo projects were started with bylaws saying you were legally required to live in the property for 1 year minimum.

I knew a guy who, on the side, was investing in single family homes. He started small doing the rental thing, then started flipping houses. We rented one of his houses at his cost while he fixed it up to flip. Eventually he played the game and got his family into a really nice $500k house near the river by McGregor Blvd. I believe he paid cash for it. After that he quit the game, just in time.

[pete]

Your aversion to cracker asses and "ethnic" vegetables aside, I agree with you! We live in Orlando, are pre-qualified, have a 20% down payment for our price range and can not find a home. We have looked for a year.

Just Sunday we looked at an 1100 sf, moldy house with a 20-30 year old kitchen and bathrooms for $220,000! Owners and realtors just shrug when you mention this. They believe they can put it on the market and it will sell, one day...

We may move out of state for this very reason!