Your House Is Not Worth That Much!!!

So, my neighbor has once again put her house up for sale. This time, she went to the hardware store and bought one of those "For Sale By Owner" signs and stabbed it into her front yard. I guess she knows something all those expensive real estate agencies don't know.

Bottom line, she wants too much money for her tiny little house. Each real estate agency that she hired to sell her home told her to lower her price and she refused.

These agencies put time and money into the attempts to sell her home. They placed ads and ran open houses. They walked lots of people through it every weekend and nothing.

Instead she painted it and then raised the price to cover the cost of the paint job. She paid roughly 280k for a 1000 sq ft home. Then she spent, by my estimates another 100k fixing up the interior and doing some landscaping. So I figure she's into this house for about 400k. Now that's alright if you're planning to stay for awhile. But she realized this wasn't the life for her and wants to return to the city.

She's listing it for 475k. Buyers aren't interested because the house can't be expanded. The septic fields stretch through the yard, so you can't add on to the house that way. And you can't build up because the house isn't strong enough to take on a second floor.

Plus, renovation costs in Westchester are outrageous. If someone did buy this cottage and try to renovate it, they' d never get a return on their investment. The limitations by the town codes control how much you could expand this house. You'd never get your money back.

For 475k in this area, you can get a pretty decent ranch house. Not easy on the eye, but an ok house. A reasonable sized house at that. Most people have kids in this area, so size matters.

I'm sure she just wants to get out of it alive and wants enough to buy a place in the city. But if she was truly a motivated seller, she'd lower her price. However, people never want to take a loss on their investments and when it comes to houses, the loss seems especially painful.

I mean, isn't easy to make money in real estate?