Wednesday, July 16, 2008

the tug of gravity...

...or signs of the times



I found this one in my peregrinations. For rent, and for sale. I know that there is some twisted logic to that - such as if it's rented, the revenue income will be a selling point! There has got to be some great big fool looking for an investment property... Thing is;

a) Who is going to rent a house that will be sold out from underneath them, and have to put up with open houses every Sunday, and other showings? I wouldn't rent it. And who is going to buy it if tenanted?

b) Rent would not cover much more than 1/2 of the mortgage payments on this POS.

Meanwhile, the house sits vacant, and sucks money down an ever bleaker black hole.

The only signs that seem to be missing, are REDUCED, and/or FORECLOSURE.

Weird.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wierd indeed. Seems like they haven`t consulted a real estate agent. I`m a Vancouver real estate agent and I can say that this is typical of people who have no idea about what to do and just want to make money fast.
Jay

patriotz said...

Actually they have Jay. Look at the sign.

This sort of thing also appeared in great numbers in US markets a couple of years ago.

An indication of distressed sellers.

Really there's no problem selling a tenanted property in an up market, because there are plenty of speculators looking for gains.

But in a down market? You're just shutting out the few GF's who just have to buy their own place now.

Art Vandelay said...

It's happened to me before. It's usually sellers who have already bought their next place and have hit the Panic button. They need cash and they need it now.

Anonymous said...

Sounds familiar. My landlord called last week, all in a panic, said he wants to sellsellsell the place we're in. Too bad for him we have a one year lease (only been here 4 months!)Rush to the exits!

Wayne said...

My hunch is that there is an apartment (I use the term cautiously, they're usually puny) for rent in this house. Sol saw the place and read the sign so I could be off base.

Anonymous said...

A house two doors down went up for sale about a month ago...the sign (unsold) came down yesterday.

In that time some of the tenants moved out, I'm assuming because they didn't want to live in a place where total strangers are walking through their living room every five minutes.

So I'm guessing they're out rent/mortgage (two of the suites are empty) - and are now going to throw it back up on the market in the fall when "things pick up"...good luck.

Will said...

Love how you swirl out the phone number like some child molester's face in Thailand.

Seriously, though, you have two options in any situation where you need cash:

Sell it (and price it well to sell, really well), or,

Rent it.

You cannot do both.

As they are attempting to rent it my guess is that they have little hope in selling it and are just fishing. Should the market drop out on them the time delay with the lease in place hampering a sale could cost them dearly more than whatever rent they are hoping to garner.

This is not the only example of someone trying to cover their short and long positions that I've seen.

Side note: If you have a tenant with a lease in place for longer than 6 months more and you want to sell I suggest you buy them out. Placing it on the market will do nothing. No one will want it.

solipsist said...

My hunch is...

There are probably 3 or 4 puny "apartments" therein (illegal), but this blace looked completely abandoned, with foot-high, dead grass. FS (that would be a f*cked seller).

Love how you swirl out the phone number like some child molester's face in Thailand.

Glad you caught that. RE Porn. It also illustrated the black hole idea. I have an interest in non-local effect, and the quantum. Solipsism too, y'know. Finally, I don't like to embarrass anyone, but I won't advertise for them either.

I usually blur the phone number, some times the name too - it depends on my mood. I wouldn't do that to your signs though (wink).

Anonymous said...

Jay,

If you're trying to improve your site's search engine ranking with your linked text in comments on Blogger, you may be disappointed to learn that it won't help your results in many search engines including Google and Yahoo.

See http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html for more details.

Will said...

I see Elli Davis pulled the same stunt on the next post.... sigh. I get the same kind of posts on my site as well. Yes, there's nofollow there to boot. Why can't people just contribute to the conversation without the obvious (and fruitless) play to get link love?

Anonymous said...

Hey, I have a blog and I don't even link it here like these others. Why? Because it is unrelated to real estate and would probably bore the crap out of you. I like this read though :-)

pbell

solipsist said...

pbell - if you sign in with your blogger id, we can check it out from your profile.

You never know what others will find to be of interest, and now, you have piqued my curiosity.

Anonymous said...

Last month, I looked at a place for rent. The prospective landlady -- bit of a flake -- wanted to sell and rent. She also wanted a lease from us. Clueless.

She said she might consider taking it off the market until the Spring, but wanted to write into the lease that during the 2010 olympics, we'd vacate the premises for a month. She had heard that someone was getting 25K for the month for a house in Squamish, and wanted to make sure she could get in on that action.

The combination of flakiness, cluelessness and outright greed was enough to completely rule that one out.