Reader Eric is pre-approved and ready to buy a house in South Florida. You’d think it would be a piece of cake considering the, uh, climate down there. Apparently not.
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 cracker 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, ethnic 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.
Yikes? Is anyone else having this problem?
More at Eric’s blog.
What Housing Slump . . . ?? [Think Daddy]
(Photo:Arryll)
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@Erwos: Yes he paid me well. And I learned to start letting calls go to voicemail more often.
In the words of Will Smith, “Welcome to Miami”.
This isn’t about bad coaching. This is the story of Florida. Florida is a terrible place, uneducated poor people abound. They think they are the middle class, but that is how people become the underclass – by being fooled.
Just think of the place to which you are moving. Do you want these folks as neighbors? We didn’t, that’s why we moved this year.
@eric, sounds like you missed a chance to make a low offer on a messy and stinky house. Why do you care if it is a mess, you hire someone to clean it before you move in anyway.
I once made a lowball offer on a beach house inhabited by tenants who would fry fish every time they heard the house was going to be shown. The owner was going to take it, then suddenly the tenants came up with a better offer.
The problem that I think some people are ignoring is that these messy houses also tend to suck when it comes to normal upkeep. The house I referenced before had storm doors literally torn off their frames, cracks in the walls, pest problems, broken interior fixtures and appliances, and so forth. Since these are short sales, no one’s going to do any improvements – so unless the bank figures out that you’re not going to pay market cost for a house that’s in below-market shape, everyone’s having their time and money wasted.
Nice pooper on the chic in the pic though!
@mac-phisto: I guess my point is that morons aren’t limited to one country, so whenever I see this “Americans…blah blah” it really ticks me off because I saw plenty of trash and cigarette butts in France – it’s not like Americans are dirty and the rest of the world is civilized.
@Jim: I’m guessing only the first part of that post was directed at me, cause I didn’t say anything about cleaning. But anyway, I actually do know several people who have left their career or business because it is dependent on a market. My mother’s been in the real estate business for 20 years, she knows the highs and lows. It doesn’t quite bother her as much as it bothers the more inexperienced agents because they probably got into it during the boom. But a lot of the difficulty is for everyone, in all markets….people who are working in smaller markets that don’t see a ton of growth anyway might not see as much of a hit, but it also means they’re probably not going to see a ton of growth.
Northern Virginia isn’t being hit as hard as a lot of markets, which is great – but it’s still difficult for a lot of people, no matter what part they play in the real estate market, if they’re a buyer, seller, or agent. I guess I just don’t see real estate agents as being horrible people..not that you were doing that…I mean, they’re not Comcast. Some of them are good, some of them aren’t – the ones I know are good, honest people who have troubles too.
@Erwos:
Do you work for free? No, I didn’t think so. If you’re a buyer and you want your agent to show you a FSBO, call the seller yourself. The seller won’t pay any commission.
As to short sales, that’s a different story entirely. Banks will pay commission on a short sale. And any agent worth their salt will work on selling you that house, if that’s what you want. If you are a buyer and you are working with an agent that won’t show you a short sale that is listed on the MLS get yourself another agent.
Disclaimer: My wife is a real estate agent. She is also listing ans selling a house for a woman in dire straits and is taking no commission to help speed the sale. She figures that when the market turns the woman is going to call her when she buys her next house.
One last word, I’ve been building or flipping houses for a while in different states. One thing I learned a long time ago is this, you can rent a house, or you can sell a house. You can’t do both.
@Rectilinear Propagation: Please, if your house is on the market, it should ALWAYS be ready for someone to show up. that’s the way it was for us in VA last summer. You wouldn’t believe how many comments we got comparing how nice ours was to some of the dumps (same size, same price range) that they’d visited.
I believe the OP to be brutally honest in his frustration.
My husband and I are in Saint Louis, trying to sell our house to move to Philly (it literally is a career move.) We’ve been hosting a few open houses because we want more exposure than one open house per month affords (it is a numbers game, to some extent) We’re in a price bracket which draws young professionals as well as established working class families, and you wouldn’t believe the stories some of our visitors tell… sounds like much of what the OP experienced. We’eve often heard, “your place looks so nice, you wouldn’t believe the place we just saw…” and I find it appalling.
Here we are concerned about how we’re going to stage the house with 1/2 hour notice on a showing, while we both work from home, and make sure we get that extra wipedown in the bathroom, and put the thawing fish back in the freezer… the house is perpetually 10 minutes from immaculate. Yet, some people, many who own the house and aren’t facing a foreclosure, are just too lazy to even let buyers in??? Oy vey! They are everywhere, in every price bracket.
However, you can blame many realtors for not giving enough notice, and sometimes no notice at all, they *just walk in* without even knocking.. so I can see how the dogbath in the sink happens, or dinner on the stove. The OP might want to have a stern talk with his agent, to make sure the agent is actually setting appointments with the homeowners, and not just scheduling with him.
It seems this market is encouraging homeowners as well as agents to be lazy. But, thank goodness, not all of them actually are. Keep looking and give feedback to the selling agent!
I work in Real Estate, and this is just the difference between people who do sell their homes and those who don’t. The ones like this who don’t, tend to be self-absorbed whiners.
This is south florida you’re talking about. You may think you’re moving into some ritzy high class neighborhood but that’s because everyone wants to BE someone down there. Its that whole keeping up with the Jones’s, gotta have a high class image thing. And besides why would you want to live down there? All of south florida will be annexed by Cuba soon enough. I hope you can speak fluent Spanish.
@pastabatman: What I meant was this guy has made some fairly sweeping generalizations. It may surprise him but there are many people in Florida with houses for sale that are not incompetent boobs, about to be evicted. @smoothtom: @jenl1625: That’s the beauty of capitalism, if you don’t like something, DON’T BUY IT. Maybe our guest complainer is looking in the wrong neighborhoods. I am sure there a great many fine homes in Isleworth or Cocoplum or Boca that would meet with his approval. Make sure to bring your wheelbarrow for the down payment.
@RokMartian:
What a stupid sleazy bitch.
How on earth can a vegetable be “ethnic?” This guy’s a little on the racist side.
I’ve seen this WAY too many times. We recently bought a house, I can’t count how many houses we saw where they weren’t staged in the least.
I am with other here as taking this as a sign to just go to the next house. I learned this from personal experience. In 2004 we were looking for a house. The market was still hot so every time we saw a house we liked it was off the market before we got a chance to make an offer. The house we ended up buying had owners like this. The place wasn’t terrible but the house had clutter and wasn’t clean. However, we looked beyond that and saw that the house had the space and layout we wanted. What we should have taken from it was that if the owners treated the house that way then it was probably a crap house that hadn’t been taken care of. Sure enough we have encountered many problems with the house because the previous owners didn’t do proper maintenance (and yes we did get the house inspected). So if the owner treats the house the shit, fuck ‘em and move on to the next house. It is probably for the best.
@SmellyGatto:
“happy to use Consumerist as a whining pulpit.”
Welcome to the internet.
@rewinditback: His comments definitely rubbed me the wrong way with “cracker” and “crazy stinky ethnic vegetable” and “boiled shit”. I’m glad I’m not the only one to think this guy sounds like a jackass. In my mind I’m imagining quite decent people who were making a nice dinner (maybe a curry?), and then being judged by some jerk they showed their home to.
@loueloui: Yeah, and the beauty of capitalism is that, when a buyer sees a seller who is selling crap, or is obviously not motivated, the buyer can call that seller out.
@sagis: Sagis, if you listed your house for sale, apparently you want to sell it. In which case, act like you do. Don’t waste my time coming by to see it if you don’t actually want to sell it.
@Sudonum: Banks will pay commission, but they generally try to negotiate it down to 5% or less.
@mac-phisto: But they ought to care what the house sells for, even if it’s being foreclosed. If the house sells for less than the mortgage, you’re on the hook for that . . . . So you should want to get as much as possible for the home.
Well at least they weren’t cooking meth in the basement a la “Breaking Bad.”
@Erwos:
And like I said any agent worth a damn should be fine with that, especially if they’re in a distressed market. As a builder I only pay a 5% commission, and I have agents falling over themselves to get my listings. I’ve had agents offer to list for 4%.
@tdogg241: Kudzu has been carrying out ethnic cleansing in that part of the country for many years.
I had a very similar experience last fall (upscale suburbs in Ohio – all houses <10 years old). We must’ve looked at over 80 houses, and at least 1/2 of those had one or more of the problems this guy described. And I guess I can’t be sure, but I don’t think many of these listings were “under duress.”
I wasn’t looking to get an extreme bargain; nor did I see myself as any sort of savior entitled to gratitude. I DID see myself of deserving the common courtesy of a clean house, where I can see what’s what, and be free of distracting odors (yes, a strong, unfamiliar scent is a visceral turnoff). Going through all those houses is exhausting enough in ideal circumstances – I definitely understand feeling “put out” when the seller lists the house but doesn’t do the rest of “his part.”
Keeping a house “10 min. from immaculate” is equally exhausting, and I think people just wear down. I just wish there was a spot to mark “not serious” on the MLS form, to save me the time and trouble.
It’s no coincidence that the house we bought was immaculate and great-smelling every time we saw it (despite being the home of two little boys). The dumps are still on the market, six months later.
My wife and I are shopping around for a new house (our first) and we’ve been running into some prolems, too.
For one, despite the housing bust and the overwhelming abundance of properties up for sale, those f’ing flippers are still gobbling up all the reasonably-priced houses in nice areas and marking them up. THREE houses we tried to put bids on got the contract awarded to a flipper who had more money to bid than we were willing to spend on the house in question.
Secondly, I think many homeowners who are in the market to sale simply aren’t willing to admit that their house isn’t worth as much as it was 2 or 3 years ago. Newly-listed houses are almost all being priced above what you can reasonably expect it to sell for. That’s why I’ve been trying to focus on houses that have been listed for a while, where the seller is under more pressure to unload (particularly forclosures).
Excuse me, I meant sell, not sale.
In the second point I mentioned, those same homeowners who are trying to sell for more than their homes are worth are also refusing to negotiation the price. Time is the only thing that will make them rethink their position.
@MYarms:
I agree. My father lives in southern Florida and tells me that it’s getting harder and harder to find store clerks that speak English around there.
A co-worker of his left Miami because he got tired of being treated like a second-class citizen by all the Spanish-speaking clerks and shop owners.
The real problem is that you’re looking for houses in Florida. Why anyone would want to move to that shithole I’ll never know.
It could have been renters. I know my boyfriend lives in a house that’s for sale and he has a roommate. That roommate is very very talented at making a mess of the kitchen and the living room and leaving it for someone else to clean.
Yeah he’s had to jump in to clean his roommate’s junk for his landlord because of a showing at one hour’s notice, even though he’s pretty much going to be homeless if the house sells.
He actually hopes to leave a good impression with the landlord, so he might somehow find another place to live with a good reference.
Situations are often not that easy to judge, you don’t know anything about the people there at the time of the showing.
When we had our house on the market it was SPOTLESS however most of the time we did stay there when we had showings b/c honestly, I didn’t trust the people going through to not steal my Jewelry. We ended up taking it off the market and waiting it out but on the homeowners’ side, sometimes we want a skeevy buyer out of our house as quickly as possible.
@ericole: I get not letting your house become a wreak while you’re trying to sell it but you have to cook dinner sometime. If the real estate agent isn’t going to give the people living there any notice you can’t get mad when it turns out they’re in the middle of dinner when you show up.
You have to give people notice, especially if you want them gone for the showing.
@tdogg241: First, he couldn’t be racist if he is commenting on ethnicity, and not race.
Second, you know precisely what he means. If he is ostensibly white, he means foods that don’t smell like the ones he is accustomed to.
This type of deal has been happening for years especially with renters.
Back in the early ’90′s one high school buddy lived with a couple of other guys in a semi-furnished winter rental beach home. They partied it up alot – I attended some of these parties.
They finally got kicked out when the land lord was bringing a real estate agent through to list the property for sale. Landlord asked if they had a dog get sick on the dining room carpet- they knew they were not supposed to have any pets. One of the other nimrods sitting on the couch said something like “No- no pets here; just step over that patch -it’s dried up human vomit.” – which was true. My friend said the look on the landlord’s face was priceless- and also let my friend know that he needed to start packing. They given 5 days to vacate…
His aversion to cracker asses and “ethnic” food aside, his sentiments are correct about Florida.
I have been looking in Orlando for the past year, am “pre-qualified” at the bank, have 20% deposit in our price range and can not buy a home here.
Sellers and realtors believe they can sell a small(900-1100 sf), moldy house with 20-50 year old kitchens and bathrooms for $250,000. The houses have had little if anything “remodeled”.
The owners will sit on or lose their house rather than budge off their price. These are houses that were priced under $90,000-$120,000 just 5 years ago! It goes on and on.
We are going to have to move out of state to buy a house.