Buying A Home
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Stay or sell?
We bought a condo 5.5 years ago in the first building of a brand-new community for $125,000. We were told the build was a 3 year project. Today there are just over half the buildings complete and the builder has sold the remaining land back to the bank. This information may not be well-known, because in the past month 3 condos in our community have sold (not new condos - those from original buyers). We would be lucky if we got $105,000 for our place. We put $7,000 down and did an 80/15/5 loan. We're wondering if we should follow the example of our neighbors and sell or stick it out hoping we'll get our value back. At this point in our mortgage, we'd break even, maybe loose a little. We have no savings to put towards a down payment for a new home, so we'd be renters again. We're dying for a house/yard/garage, so would giving up our condo be worth gaining that quality of life renting a house? It's a tough decision that we're unsure of. Any insight would be appreciated.
Re: Stay or sell?
I'd probably sell now and take a little loss if you can. Eventually the bank is going to start selling off those units, and it is going to most likely bring the value of yours down further.
If you want to stick it out, you're probably looking at a considerable amount of time before (and thats if) the housing prices go back up. You're going to have to wait it out for all of the bank owned units to be sold, and then for other units to resell at fair market prices.
When you say "little loss" are you counting in the difference of sales price and amount owed plus closing costs and realtor commissions? We found that got the price cost prohibitive for us, so we are staying put. We did a HARP refi which will pay for itself in about 4-5 months, and allow us to save more aggressively so in a year we hope to be in a better situation to buy our way out of this house and into something more desirable.
Things we also considered:
1. What the new rental would really cost us.
2. What the actual physical move would cost us
3. Renting out current place to a tenant and renting another place for us (we didn't want to be landlords)
4. How long we want to stay in our area (we actually want to relocate and hope to do so in a year, which also meant staying put made most sense vs moving 2x in short time span)
Thanks, julygal, those are good things to think about. What I mean is we owe just about exactly what we'd sell the place for. So yes, we'd have to pay out of savings for closing costs if requested of us and any other associated fees. We have quite a few realtor friends and would hope to avoid their fees.
It makes perfect sense to stay in the area because it's right where my husband works. There's really nothing terrible about our home or the condo community, other than the fact that half of it is desolate landscape. We're so afraid of being stuck. Since our neighbors have had luck selling it just feels like pressure for us to do the same.