Suburbs of Pittsburgh. House across the street sold in a day with multiple offers for asking price. It’s move-in condition and there’s not much inventory at this price point. You have to move-up to McMansion level if you want to buy into our area. Not sure about that market.
House down the street is under contract. Took a month or two. Inside needs to be updated. Doubt they got asking price.
Common theme for the last year or two is asking price or better and sold in days IF the house is move-in condition.
I keep reading houses have to be in “move-in” condition. Does no one like to buy and remodel to their own taste anymore? I absolutely hate seeing flipped homes. More often than not, it is done cheaply, and grey grey grey everywhere. When we sell our home, it will either go to someone who loves 50’s vintage, or be gutted and remodeled by someone who thinks everything is too old. Hoping for the former But for us to prepare the house to move-in condition, I’m guessing we would never re-coup the remodeling costs.
The issue with move in ready is the majority of buyers do not want to renovate anything. Either they are a family that does not have the time or energy to renovate anything or they see large dollar signs to fix kitchens and bathrooms. Most would have to live somewhere else while repairs are made. They just don’t want the hassle of moving two or three times or the cost.
Trying to sell an outdated home limits the buyer pool significantly.
In areas where move-in ready sells and dated homes don’t, I think the signal that is being sent is that many people just don’t want a big project. We are in the 6th month of a remodel that still has a few months to go. When we bought it, we thought we had a 3 or 4 month project on our hands. Had we known what we were getting into, we would have definitely bought a move-in ready home, even if it wasn’t perfect with respect to our tastes. Apparently a lot of people feel this way. It’s a tough time to take on a big project.
But of course, as always, all of this stuff is completely market dependent. What is true in one location would be completely different in another.
It’s also easier with low interest rates to buy a move in ready home amortized over 30 years than come up with either cash or refinance the house or take out a home equity loan for remodeling.
Many young couples have no time, are older and have responsibilities or interests that preclude doing long and costly renovations
I always thought it was kinda funny with these HGTV programs that if you have a certain budget, that if you went under that budget, you would have that money to remodel. In my experience, if we went under budget, we had a smaller house payment. It took a long time to come up with that “extra” money to remodel.
And then the remodel has structural and hidden problems that have to be taken care of. I was paying for heating systems and roof instead of pretty kitchens and baths
Northern Virginia suburbs here. There are still very few houses for sale in the large development I live in. A house on my street sold very quickly recently so I assume asking price or close (maybe more?). I can tell you in a few months when it’s in the paper. The house is nice size and pictures were beautiful.
We plan to sell in about 2 years. Hopefully things don’t change much. We are well located so that should help.
@helpingmom40 Your area is where my husband said recently in a year or two look for a little fixer upper! We’ve only been to Lake George once but I bet that is expensive. I love the idea of a little Hudson River town but with coffee/restaurants/wineries not too far. We’ll see . . . .
One of my favorite shows is Maine Cabin Masters where they do amazing work on rundown “camps”. Maine is so far but hope to visit some day.
I live in a small town in Worcester County in MA. We have great school system that’s small (1200 kids total) that’s highly regarded. People mostly move here because of the schools. Right now (good friend is a realtor) there aren’t many homes on the market and they sell quickly. Often, there are bidding wars.
Cash available is another big issue for buyers. Even if a fixer upper is a good deal, the buyer needs to have at least 100k cash available to update a house. Most buyers don’t have that (they used it for the down payment), they need to roll their purchase into a loan, especially with low interest rates as noted above.
During the pandemic, would you want strangers coming in and out of your home, especially when many people are working from home. Most of those buyers are families with children, probably not with a lot of reserve after buying a house and most likely wouldn’t be able afford paying for 2 residents while one is getting renovated.
I know D1 was more inclined to do renovation before the pandemic, but not now. She turned down an apartment when she didn’t like the quality of remodeling.
Also a good point. Pre-COVID, we felt lucky that we could remodel the new place while still living in our current home. Now, we may not be able to sell our current house (gated community, which is good in many ways, but doesn’t get drive by traffic, combined with high inventory just on our one little block). In a few months, if we haven’t sold current home, may have to put the new place on the market as well and live in whichever home doesn’t sell, which is more likely to be our current home. I don’t want to think about not being able to sell either one. Our market is not so hot as those being described here. The neighborhood of our re-model is a desired neighborhood with very little available inventory, though, so that house may well sell. Hopefully we can get the money out of it that we are spending, but no guarantees there either.
Normal economic indicators at the time told us we were not doing anything risky by not selling current home before getting involved in another big project. We never imagined a collapsed economy happening almost overnight. We are extremely lucky that even worse case with our situation, we will still be okay. Many other people are not. I don’t know how some of my relatives are going to make it through this crisis without having to declare bankruptcy.
After doing a major renovation after buying our current home, I would never do it again unless we had the money to live elsewhere during the construction. And frankly if we had the money for a big renovation and could carry another property for 6-12 months, we would just up the budget and get a house that was already done.
Our experience, in multiple markets, is usually sellers with dated properties are over priced when you consider all the costs a buyer would need to put in to bring it up to today’s standards.
We got lucky with our house that it had been sitting stale on the market for a while and we got to it after a huge price reduction. We were able to negotiate down even further after inspection.
The definition of “move in ready” sure has changed since we bought our first house in 1983. At that time, it meant that the house was solid, all items needed to live in it were clean and in working order.
It didn’t mean it had been renovated to the nines, or that renovations done were our taste.
I do think now is a hard time to have others in your home doing work, and that needs to be factored in. If I were buying now, and felt the need to have work done, I would get it mostly done before I moved in…by a couple of weeks.
I guess our current house isn’t considered “move in ready” because we haven’t painted the custom wood trim white, replaced the kitchen cabinets, etc.
But we have a new roof, new exterior and interior paint, floors redone, new heating system to be done in the fall, new driveway, beautiful and now well maintained landscaping, a private lake beach, granite counters, etc.
Friends with a house in similar “move in condition” just got three offers at their asking price within 5 days of listing their home. Sold. Semi rural NW CT.
I agree with you @thumper1. “Move in ready” is a continuum, and different to me than “turn key.” For us looking for our current house we had some minimum criteria: location was number one. Number two was no major structural issues as the neighborhoods we were looking at were all historic districts with 100+ year old homes. (And yes, we saw plenty of houses where the entire renovation budget and then some would have gone to making sure the house wasn’t going to collapse). Number three was updated mechanicals as I didn’t want to tear up an old house to re-wire and re-plumb everything. Number four was a layout that would be conducive to updates like adding a master suite without destroying other parts of the house.
I feel like we hit the jackpot with our house. New roof, new HVAC, new basement waterproofing system, etc… It gave the opportunity to do the exciting renovations (kitchen and bath).
That said, our realtor told us most buyers want turn key in this area and that sellers would be leaving money on the table without all the updates.
In our area just outside DC, renovation costs are exorbitant. We just bought 2 months ago, and it was more cost effective for us to buy a more expensive house that was move-in ready than take on a fixer upper (even a minor one). Plus, DH is an essential worker and we could not even consider having folks working inside the house at this time.
But that said, move-in ready doesn’t necessarily have to mean upgraded. You don’t need carrara marble everything people! Someone’s “upgrade” is someone else’s “not my taste.” When we bought recently, I noticed that the houses that went the quickest had fresh coat of paint, clean and moderately-updated kitchens and master baths, and decent, consistent flooring. Sure, we saw a number of houses with decked out gourmet kitchens, movie rooms, saunas, fancy laundry rooms, etc., but they did not sell for much more than the ones that were more moderately-updated. In our area, the folks taking on fixer uppers are more apt to do a full tear down and rebuild than do a large renovation.
My sister lives in the same Ca city that I do. Her neighborhood has had a huge number of home sell in the past few months. From the looks of things when I drive by everyone is doing major remodeling. When I walk I see a lot of construction going on so people are allowing workers inside or maybe they haven’t moved in yet.
We are in MA, northwest of Boston. Home in the neighborhood was listed just as the Covid lockdown was starting up - was sold that very weekend, above asking. And this home hadn’t been remodeled recently. Was very surprising to us.
D moved to Ohio and was looking to buy a condo/starter home. We watched the market there - most places went over asking, the same day/weekend they were listed!
Inventory seems to be drying up a bit now though - I don’t get that many email notifications from zillow any more
But for us to prepare the house to move-in condition, I’m guessing we would never re-coup the remodeling costs.
