House Selling Crazy Idea?

[Hakim]

You've gotten good advice both ways here. The comment about rental home owners wanting to buy low is probably correct in most cases.

If you do want to sell the home yourself, check out this web site. They sell a book for around $30 that would probably give great info and avoid mistakes and headaches. I used the book to FSBO my home recently, and saved about $14,000 in RE agent commissions. Took about 4 months to sell. Probably the BEST thing would be to rent it out and use as investment, if you can do so. Good luck!
<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.fsbohelp.com>http://www.fsbohelp.com</A>.

 

[patrickg]

Dan, Preperatory to moving out of SO CAL we sold a two on one rental property. We engaged an agent who specialized in rentals (our property manager) and he marketed principally to rental owners and the house sold rather quickly to the owner of a nearby property. I think your basic thinking is sound but many owners of rentals are at least semi-professional buyers, many of which do not want the agony of dealing with potentially emotional amatures.
Folks in the rental "game" want to know what a place will realistically rent for, its occupancy percentage and prospects and any defered maint vs selling price and any special circumstances. You might always luck out and find a rich fool but it is unlikely.

Some still use the antiquated and not always so accurate guestimate that a house is worth 100 times the gross monthly rent. If you try to get much more than that it will slow down the process. Give your plan a try, maybe you'll get lucky but you will get more action with a commisioned sales person working to make a buck on your team.

Contact the rental agents first not just "regular" real estate sales offices as they know most of the "big time" owners and often are privy to who is looking to buy.

In our case the proceeds of our sale went to a third party "accomodater" and when we found a property to buy the funds were transfered there. We never touched or controlled the proceeds of the sale so it was not a taxable event. this was 4 years ago. The capital gains rules have been relaxed a bunch and you don't have to junp through those hoops anymore. If you live long enough eventually you see something the Government/IRS does that is better.

Best of luck to you,

Patrick

 

[Gary_in_Indiana]

I was on the other side of a deal like that. I bought a house with the intent of using it as a rental. The people there were moving out of state but needed someplace to live until then. I was able to negotiate a very good price in exchange for very liberal closing terms.

Essentially, I told them they could probably get more money than I was offering because while they wanted to sell hearth and home, I was just buying brick and mortar. What I did offer, however, was the opportunity to pick their closing date. I could close within a week or in six months or longer. I didn't care.

It worked out for each of us. They only had to move once, didn't have to rent an interim home, didn't have to endure double housing expense and a 4 hour drive one way every weekend to mow the grass, etc., while they were waiting the sale or closing and I got a good rental at a good price.

 

[dmccarty]

Gary,

I'm going to kinda hit on a bunch of different posts with just
one. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

The situation that you had with buying a house by having
flexability on the closing date is what we are looking for since
we aren't likely to have a firm date to get the new house built.
Hince the idea of selling to "investor" types.

We have thought of just renting the house but we need the
equity to pay down/off other loans. I can get a better cash
flow with the equity than I can by renting.

I went out and looked at the tax records for my area. Thank
goodness the county has all of this online. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif Its real
easy to find comparables over the last three years as well
as when houses where selling. In 2000 FOUR houses sold
in December which was really suprising. Looks like most
homes sold from March to September. But that really
meant that two or three houses sold each month instead of
one or two. Not much of a difference. Most houses don't
seem to take more than a few months to sell from what we
can see....

So we are going to do the following.....
1 - Make some phone calls to the people who own the houses
next to us.
2 - Talk to some companies that manage rental properties for
"investors" and see what they say.
3 - Get a second phone line back in the house to use for all of
these calls so I can just turn off the phone and not be
bothered. Or more importantly not ring when getting the kid
to sleep. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif
4 - I know the values of the houses that have sold but we
will pay a professional to come and appraise the house.
5 - If the investor approach does not work then will sell by
owner. If that does not work then I'll pay an agent.

Later....
Dan McCarty