My Personal Finance Blog

Writing from the road so this will also be short…

We received an offer on our house in Detroit. It is well below our asking price (asking $465, offer is $350). We’ll try negotiating it up a bit.

At this point I am inclined to sell the place for a number of reasons:

• It is costing us around $1,800 a month in taxes, insurance, interest and upkeep.
• Add another $1,200 to that which goes to equity each month, meaning our cash flow is around -$3,000)
• The real-estate market in Detroit is likely to get worse before it gets better.
• My wife’s relocation benefits run out in August (they pay the sales commission)
• We would still walk away with significant equity.
• I just want to be done with it…

The offer is for cash, the buyer doesn’t need financing and has no other house to sell. This is a concern in today’s market because sales are so sluggish. Also mortgage lending standards have gotten much tougher in the past couple of months due to the sub-prime fiasco. A huge number of appraisers in Michigan have lost their licenses due to their setting too high a value on homes in order for buyers to get mortgages they really couldn’t afford. This has caused appraisers to become much more conservative and our realtor has said that they have had many deals fall through because buyers can no longer get financing.

Basically we picked one of the worse times in recent history to sell our home…

I’ll post updates as they come in.