All Forum Posts by: Rick Fischer

@Chesley White - Hi Chesley, thanks for the warm welcome! It would be great to meet up with you and hear some of your experiences in the area. Maybe my wife and I could meet with you for lunch sometime. We are just ramping up, so we could use any "on-the-ground" advice that we can get. Thanks again.

@Darren Sager - Thanks for welcoming my wife and I to the site. I've been listening to as many podcasts as I can (including the one on the UBG) and my wife has read the UBG. We're wading our way through all of the information but there is definitely a ton here so it will take some time. Thanks for the tips. See you around the forum!

Rick

@Matt R. that's a really great idea! It would be great if I could use a platform like kickstarter.com where everyone gives the site their credit card info and once I hit a minimum number of tickets it would charge them all. I think you would really need a good platform to get the kind of publicity needed to pull something like that off. I'll have to think that one through a little more. Thanks for the creative idea!

And we are definitely going to be using the fantastic advice from @Jon Holdman

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I really appreciate the in-depth info from everyone. We decided to lower the price. It went through yesterday and we have a showing today. Could be coincidence but we will see. Our contract is ending and we will be using your advice @Jon Holdman and will be interviewing multiple agents before signing yet another listing contract. I'm really hoping it doesn't get that far.

@Fran Flanagan - Thanks for the website! I'll check it out.

@Justin Trudell - Thanks for the empathy. Sounds like exactly our situation. Too many days on market has definitely been something I've worried about.

@Colleen F. - There is not a mandatory golf fee. The golf course and community are managed separately and the HOA dues are separate from the golf dues if you want to be a member.

@Jon Holdman - It makes a lot of sense Jon. And that kind of grounded unemotional logic is exactly why I decided to look at this from an investment point of view rather than a home-owner based emotional point of view. We just need to unload and accept our losses. Question for you though - do you think days on market affects the perceived value of the home? This relates to Justin's post above. We listed the house at 459k because we know there was a home down the road that sold for the same price but it has less square footage and a smaller lot (and other homes have sold for more). Our house is listed at the lowest $/sq ft in the neighborhood and homes have sold all around us in the past couple years. That is the part that baffles me. We have not received any negative feedback. Only somewhat negative thing we get is "nice house but not for us".

@Bryan H. - Understand what you are saying. Completely agree except for the points I gave to Jon above. The comps in the neighborhood are selling for more. What gives?

Thanks everyone for the quick feedback.

@Marcus Johnson - I should have specified that we lived in the house for the first year and a half of the home being listed. In that time we were searching for and purchasing land and then going through the building process of our current home. Since we needed somewhere to live during that time, we didn't have the urgency to sell that we have now. Dropping the price is an option we considered but I didn't want to jump to that conclusion without consulting the experts here first to see if there were other options we hadn't considered. Based on yours and others feedback - we may not have a choice.

@Dion DePaoli - We did have to remove the home from the MLS while we were refinancing. We thought that pulling the home off of the market during that process might also allow it to show as a new listing when we put it back on. We got a small spike but not much. When we moved out of the house 6 months ago we changed realtors to someone that has more experience. He owns his own real estate agency with a number of agents working for him. He has a much more aggressive marketing plan than our previous agent so I thought it would be a good move. We listed with him at 479k and dropped to 459k right around Thanksgiving time. This is a tough time of year anyway so we wanted to see what happened through the end of January. The end of January is here and nothing has happened. Our listing contract is expiring soon so that's why I'm looking for my best option to unload the home quickly and get out of the monthly bleeding situation. Also, are you suggesting that we keep the home off of the market for a couple months after our listing contract expires?

@Fran Flanagan - Your estimates are pretty close but we also have escrow payments for insurance and taxes in addition to the utility bills. It's a huge hit. As stated above, we've only been out of the house for less than 6 months but enough is enough. I'll look at the short sale option but I don't have any idea how that affects our credit (if any). I'll do more research on the short sale.

If we drop the price drastically - does a for sale by owner make sense or is it generally just a waste of time?

I recently introduced myself and this is my first real post. Hopefully I'm posting this in the right place!

My wife and I are currently looking to begin our real estate investment adventure but have a bit of an anchor that is blocking the path a little. We recently moved into a smaller home and are having trouble selling our former (and much larger) home. The home has been listed on the MLS with a couple different agents for over 2 years now. I started to think that we should use this very unfortunate situation as a learning tool for us by looking at it as an "investment deal gone bad" and doing what we have to do to get out of it. Here are some details:

The home is brick on 1 acre of land in a golf course community. It is on a cul-de-sac with great curb appeal. We initially listed it for 535,000 a couple years ago and it is currently listed at 459k. We refinanced it about a year ago and it was appraised at 485k at that time. (We had it listed for 479k during the appraisal process). The home is a 5/4 with 4700 sq ft of finished space and an unfinished 1400 sq ft walkout basement. I don't really want to post what we owe on it but with the closing costs, 6% agent commission and a small buffer for requested repairs, we will pretty much break even at the current listing price.

We have also had the house listed for rent for about 5 months now. We've gotten very little response from that and I don't honestly feel comfortable renting it as it would be a negative cashflow deal. We are desperate though and are looking for a way to eliminate the mortgage payment along with the other expenses of heating/cooling and maintaining the house while it is listed.

Do you have any ideas on how to get out of a property like this? Is there more information you need? (I'm sure there is) Please help us move past this roadblock so we can move on with our future investments!

Thank you!

Rick

Hey everyone!

How's that for a keyword packed title? It's a lofty goal but it's a great mindset and very exciting to think that my wife and I are at the beginning of a journey that could one day have us telling that story to many thousands of people (Hopefully as a How-to story and not a What-not-to-do story). OK, so back to reality :) Our real reason for wanting to get into real estate is to secure our financial future and, ultimately, pave the way to financial freedom.

As the title says, my wife (Susan) and I live in South Carolina. We are in our mid 30's and have been married for 12 years. We have two little boys and are really enjoying our very hectic life right now. We are getting into this journey as partners and she should be joining up in the near future. We have been researching real estate investment off and on for several years now. We've even taken a guru course together in the past. Much of what we have seen has felt very conceptual to me, so the real world examples (and actionable information) of this site may just be what we need to convince us to dip our toes in. I work in IT and my wife stays home with the boys. She is currently looking into getting a real estate license. We are both working our way through listening to all of the podcasts and the real estate license seems to be a popular recommendation. We will be looking into local groups as well. As a contract based consultant, I am well aware of the power in networking.

We are currently in a double mortgage situation with our personal properties. I'll be posting a separate topic asking for advice in this situation so please offer any advice you might have! Hopefully we can provide value back to the site by participating in the forums in the future as we proceed in our journey.

Looking forward to future conversations!

Rick Fischer