A Tale of Housing Woe: Unable to Sell

Selling their home for more than a year now, my in-laws have have had no luck. Longtime empty-nesters who moved to the Sunshine State two decades ago from the New York metropolitan area, they want to move into a smaller house, but they feel that they can’t afford to do that until they sell the home they now own.

For the past decade, my in-laws have lived in a 1980s single-family home in a gated, well-maintained, seniors-only community about five miles from the Atlantic Ocean in Boynton Beach, Florida, a city of about 67,000 residents in Palm Beach County.

Their one-story, ranch-style home sports a rugged stone facade and is about 3,000 square feet, with three bedrooms, hardwood floors, volume ceilings and an upgraded kitchen. A former interior designer, my mother-in-law has tastefully decorated the home and dozens of her paintings cover most of the walls.

The home sits on a quiet cul-de-sac and backs up to a retention pond. It’s a beautiful, inviting place despite its age, but it has become too much for them to keep up with now that they are in their 70s. They don’t want to buy another home, but instead they want to rent a condominium or perhaps move into an assisted-living facility because they are worried about their declining health.

My in-laws have a real estate agent. Occasionally the agent brings a potential buyer to look at the home. But nobody has made an offer to buy their home — which is in immaculate condition — even though they have lowered the asking price from $370,000 to $270,000 since they originally listed the home for sale in the middle of 2006.

The most-recent-would-be-buyer-who-looked-but-didn’t-make-an-offer told my in-laws that after seeing the home, she would much prefer a new home “because it would be new and nothing would break for a long time, but since this house is more than 20 years old, I would have to fix a bunch of stuff within a year or two of moving in.”

I told my in-laws that they could offer a home warranty to allay those kinds of concerns. For a few hundred dollars, a home warranty would cover major systems and appliances from failure for the first year or more after the sale and provide confidence for a buyer that they would have little additional financial outlay after they move in.

My mother-in-law welcomed this advice, but she lamented that they should have sold the home two years ago when the real estate market was still hot. She’s considering withdrawing the home from the market until things rebound, but she’s anxious about how long she can wait it out before they are forced to move due to health issues.

“Especially since we’re not looking to buy, we should have sold before the market slumped,” she said.  ”Since the market downturn, even if we got an offer now, we would be taking a substantial loss. But we may have to take a major hit because we could be forced to sell if health issues force us to.”

This is a common problem these days, especially for homeowners interested in selling but not in buying. We all hear about the current buyer’s market, but most buyers are also sellers (of an existing home), so their housing dilemma is a double-edged sword. Homeowners like my in-laws, who are not looking to buy but only to sell, missed their best chance when the housing economy was in a major upswing. But that all ended more than a year ago.

One possible solution that my in-laws are now investigating is the idea of renting out their existing home. Renting would allow them to move into something more manageable — and since they have paid off the mortgage and their existing home is paid for, the rent they would collect would easily cover the taxes and insurance on the existing home while providing a portion of what they need to pay the rent on their new residence.

Many homeowners who have been unable to sell have pursued a similar path: taking their home off the market and renting it instead, allowing them to move on.

Of course, renting out your home introduces a host of thorny new issues: we all know renters often leave a home in worse shape than they found it, which can cost the owner in repairs, upkeep and aggravation. And my in-laws’ reason for wanting to move from their home is not because they no longer like the home or community, but because their age prevents them from keeping up with repairs and upkeep and because they want to avoid the aggravations of home ownership.

So for now, my in-laws waffle about what to do. But the clock is ticking and time may run out on them before they can realize any profit from the biggest investment of their lives. 

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