In a couple of weeks a long awaited event returns. No I”m not talking about the Super Bowl. I’m talking about the beginning of the Official Spring Real Estate market.
Most realtors will tell you that any time is a good time to let them sell your house. However, if you were to put your house on the market today, by the time the people looking to buy a home (aka the elusive mythical Buyer that had been feared extinct for the last few years) start their house searches, your place will have been on the market for a while, getting that kinda stale scent to it.
Then your realtor will say something like “well your house has been sitting on the market for a month now, I think you need to lower your asking price.” She will of course conveniently forget that she was the one who urged you to get it on the market as quickly as possible.
While realtors will try to convince you that any time is a good time to put your house on the market, the true season begins the day after the Super Bowl. Why do people start looking for houses the day after the Super Bowl? No one is really sure exactly why. Perhaps because without football on Sundays, wives have a better chance of dragging their husbands to open houses (or vice versa). Maybe it’s too cold to work on outdoor projects and honey-do items but not too cold to check out the latest listing in person.
I really think that what happened was someone needed a deadline to get their house ready and an agent said “get it listed by Super Bowl Weekend” and it stuck.
We have a decision to make. We could put our condo on the market while we look for a house, with the hope that we sell our condo first, and thus would have a little more buying power. This would require putting half our stuff in storage so that the place can be properly staged.
We could also take it a step further and move into our Sister-in-Law’s house and start renting our condo. The reason for this is because lenders want two years of rental income on your taxes before they credit you that for mortgage loan purposes. I don’t think it will take 2 more years to find a house, but considering how long we’ve been looking, it would maximize our options.
By the way, my Superbowl prediction: Harbough brothers duke it out ala Baltimore vs San Francisco with our first overtime Superbowl ever. It is won with a defensive touchdown by none other than Ray Lewis.
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