Any updates as to how the market is doing in your area?
We went down to see a few condos in the Boston area. It sounds like condos are on the market longer and several folks have dropped their prices. Could even be some room for negotiation. We are debating about buying one…
Still strong in Colorado. There is less than a month’s worth of inventory for SFH. People fleeing dense cities for wide open spaces plus Denver and Boulder being named USNWR’s top two cities in the country to live has surely helped.
The rental house we owned will be closing soon for more than our asking price. Our realtor wasn’t sure we would even get our price when we listed it in mid Oct. We put 35K into updates into it. I’m not sure if we really had to or not, but at least we’re getting our money back. I just don’t know if we’d have made more/less/same in profit without the updates. It definitely needed some things done. The previous tenants had been there for years, only moving out because they bought their own place elsewhere.
The way prices have gone up I don’t know if we should have kept it longer, but we’re getting older and don’t really want to keep being landlords, so we’re not looking back. If the market remains good and other tenants leave we’ll be selling those too.
I learned something new this week about seeking rental property. Unless you 1031 exchange it into like property you will owe long term capital gains which I knew. What I didn’t know was that you owe taxes also on any amount of depreciation one has taken.
I am a real estate/transactional attorney in Memphis, TN. My partner does residential closings. We are both agents for a national title insurance company. We have seen a major increase in home sales this year, but not so much in refinances (which is interesting given the rates). Talking to agents in Memphis, it is very much a seller’s market. The inventory is way down. Properties in the better school districts move quickly (Memphis has a high number of private schools as the largest public school district is quite bad, but the smaller neighboring districts are amongst the best in the state). There is a massive backlog of eviction cases, though. Courts were closed early in the pandemic and have not fully reopened. There is a large backlog of existing cases and once the moratorium on some evictions is lifted, there will be a rush for more to be filed. Frankly, we are currently more interested in that. Small-time residential real estate investors are hurting. There’s a reckoning coming in that industry and it likely will not be pretty.
For the record, though, Memphis has some of the cheapest real estate in the country. A high-end 4000+ sq.ft. house on a 1/3rd acre (depending on the area and finish) runs $500k-$750K. You really cannot find that in other places…but then, it’s Memphis.
@mom60 you tally as gains the sale price of the property minus any costs of improvements minus your purchase price minus the depreciation you were entitled to take, so if you failed to take it, they still require you to subtract it.
I just heard from a realtor friend that home sales in the place where we have a vacation home (MA Cape and Islands) are at an all time high. Her explanation–professionals who can work from home (in this case primarily folks from NY/NJ/MA) are looking to escape to more rural areas. Grateful to be here already.
Denver ranked No. 8 for the most moved to city in the U.S. from April 2020 to October 2020.
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/12/16/denver-most-moved-to-cities-covid-pandemic/
We moved into this condo building at the beginning of July. Another unit (with a different floor plan) closed around the same time. On Friday a unit with that same different-from-ours floor plan sold for $110k more than the one in July did. Same level, so no difference in view. The second one was “slightly” nicer in terms up updating, but that is a huge increase in sales price in five months! So glad we got into this building when we did.
Real estate priced correctly on the beach or on the intracoastal side in our area is going within 3-4 days.
We sold my parents condo in FL in less than 24 hours. Multiple offers.
We bought a home in Northern Michigan a few months ago. At the time there was very little inventory available and every home sub 400K (very expensive for the area) had significant issues. We ended up purchasing a home from a Covid related estate that never went on the market but was in very good condition but a little (1990s) dated.
Now, in the same area, there is no inventory of even the problem places. All that is left are homes that are not in move-in condition- meaning under construction- , mobile/manufactured homes and land. Even the $1-2 million properties are gone. You can’t get a contractor to return your calls. No one really knows what the prices are because there are no comps. It might be 5-10% or more higher than a month or two ago since interest rate have fallen even further. And I thought a 30 yr 2.75% loan was pretty good. That is lower than the loan my parents had in the 1960’s.