Backstory: my partner and I bought our house late 2019, it was our first home purchase. It is a 2 story 1979 build,2400sqft 4 bed, 1 half bath, 2 full bath, plus a sort of awkward pass through bonus room that has the washer and dryer. Half an acre in a college town in Georgia. We bought it for 200k. We owe about 180k on it now.
Since then, life has been busy, we had 4 kids (set of twins if you're doing the math), my in person job went remote, tripled our dual income, a lot has changed and we knew eventually we'd need more space. In the meantime with life being busy we did not do a ton of updates on our house, redid one bathroom, carpet in one room, but the wooden front porch isn't in great shape and the house could use TLC and modern updates throughout. We casually looked at houses, but were mostly just looking for fun until we stumbled upon our dream home. Long story short, we are under contract on that house and set to close Oct 10th.
Here is where my question really begins, we used a realtor who came VERY highly recommend and trusted from my partners parents, they've bought/sold many houses with her over the last 30 years. We had her do a walk through of our house as we hadn't decided if we were going to sell it or rent it, but knew with moving into the new house and everything we didn't really want to spend the time/money to fix it up or update it.
We asked her what she thought it would sell for as is and she said at BEST 250k, which surprised me a bit as zillow has it valued at 400k (which i know isn't accurate, but didn't expect a 150k difference). She said it would be best to find a special buyer who didn't mind if we didn't fix it up, and said she knew someone who was looking–her handyman who wanted a bigger house but for his kids to stay at the same school. She asked if he could tour it, he did and then offered 249k to buy as is (pending inspection, which he had yesterday but hasn't gotten the report back yet) stating that the bank did a drive by appraisal and said he couldn't pay more than 249k for it–she stated he is doing a shorter term loan while he did some repairs before moving in. We additionally offered the deal of taking over our mortgage (VA, 3.5%) but he said he didn't have the liquid to cover the distance on what we'd need to be bought out. Because of the way this happened (and her acting as both of our realtors) we didn't list our home or actually ever go on the market with it.
My question is: are we being foolish to not list? Does this seem like we are being taken for fools? If the difference of listing/not listing is 5k, fine this is easier, but I don't know if we are being silly. Its really hard to do comps as nothing comparable in our neighborhood has gone on the market in the last 3+ years.
Is this a bad deal? What would you do.
byu/MaryQuOfButterscotch inRealEstate
Posted by MaryQuOfButterscotch
3 Comments
You don’t necessarily have to list but you can call a competing realtor over and have them do a CMA.
I think you will only know its worth when you list somewhere between 250-400. People who list get more .
Yes, it is foolish to not have spoken to 3 agents and have them provide you with an estimate of what they think the house is worth and the comps they used to make that decision.
Yes, it is foolish to have dual agency on a sale.
It seems like you already signed the contract so I don’t know how you could get out of this deal now. You could just refuse to sign and possibly end up in court, paying lawyers and any judgements against you and be *forced* to sell. I haven’t heard many people doing this, but the buyer is the agent’s friend, so he may have her connections and would be willing to take on the time and risk of forcing you to perform on the sale.