Well,not really. My wife and I just had an offer accepted on a house. We did offer what she was asking but I still feel like we’re stealing the house. The house was assesed in 2009 at $165,000 and she is selling the house for $116,875. The roof,furnace, hot water heater, and windows are all less than 6 years old. The woman is elderly and is moving into a smaller,much smaller, condo and wanted out.
I can’t believe I actually feel a little guilty over this. I know this is what she was asking for the house but I just can’t believe our luck on this. And before you ask we have looked at the house and we are having an inspector go through the house.
So wish me luck,curse my good luck for finding this house or for those of you who like to gloat over the misfortunes of others start crossing your fingers that some giant roadblock gets thrown if front of us and I lose my ass on this house.
Having been on the other side of one of these: don’t feel guilty. The seller is probably just as ecstatic as you are about the sale. The value of something, houses especially, isn’t what it’s appraised at – it’s what someone will actually pay. And houses are often an albatross around the neck of a seller who just wants to move on; the actual price may not matter much to them at all (within reason).
Let me echo what TimeWinder said: when I was trying to sell my house, I just wanted it SOLD. The bank was accepting a short sale and I just wanted it GONE. Any seller was a blessing.
Funny, I just did the same. House went on the market in December for the same price a similarly sized and shaped but not quite as nice house had sold for about five doors down a few months prior.
We just bought it for $45,000 less than it went on the market for. The home inspection was yesterday, and everything checked out. There wasn’t anything wrong with the house at all.
The sellers paid $10,000 less than what we paid for it, in 2001, and during the time they were there they completely finished the basement and turned it into a gorgeous walkout, put on a new roof, bought a new water heater and sump pump, and did thousands of dollars worth of landscaping.
I’m still pinching myself.
Well, if it makes you feel better, usually several times a month I see listings of foreclosure sales where houses are sold for less than $20k. Cheapest I’ve seen was ~$5k and the average market price in my state is $500k.
When we put in an offer on our house last summer, we offered $20,000 less than they were asking (I think it was); they came back and said they were selling their dead son’s house, they just wanted it over with, and they’d take $15,000 less than asking and no more haggling. We took the deal and were very happy with it.
I agree with not feeling guilty - the seller has a responsibility to do their own homework and set a proper price, too. Best of luck to you with this whole thing! 
I had a similar experience
One of my superiors bought a condo in my area and lived there for about 2 years. His wife couldn’t get used to the Midwestern weather so she moved back to Florida. He spent about a year spending half his time with his wife, half his time in the condo.
Finally got sick of it and put it on the market. It languished there for 2 years (go go housing bust!) until he offered it to me since he knew I rented.
He paid in the low $200ks about seven years ago. He was willing to sell it to me for $150k.
Bonus for me:
- It was a steal
- Very little negotiation. He told me he just wanted to clear his mortgage, and the price he offered was very attractive to me.
- I had a lawyer, but it was very very easy since him (seller) and I knew each other well but had a fairly professional relationship (I work under him, but not directly.) Plus my company has a legal plan in the benefits so the lawyer didn’t cost me anything other than the $10/month I pay for the benefit.
Bonus for him
- His monthly cash flow is much better.
- He dumped his Realtor before the sale (after all, realtor had two years to sell it and didn’t. Plus, it’s not like the realtor found me.) This saved him a good chunk on commission.
- No haggling, and no dicking around in the negotiations or closing. Obviously since we have a professional relationship already and I am below him in the company hierarchy, I’m not going to be a jerk unless I want it to hurt my job.
So really we both benefited. Worked out quite well.
Where do you get those? Yeah, it’s preying on people, but… I want to own a house, not far from my folks, because I have to keep an eye on them.
Thing is, this is Westchester County, NY and if I can’t find a miracle, it’s 250k minimum. I can’t make that kind of commitment.
I recently bought a house for 150K. It was on the market for nearly a year amd was originally going for about 180K, but no one took it so the price dropped. Don’t feel badly OP. The owner had passed and his children didn’t want the house. Sure they wanted some profit, but they really wanted to get the house off of their hands also.
I’m not going to try and translate the prices, but I bought my flat from a young couple who had been offered an ancient house that hadn’t been declared ruinous simply because nobody had tried to do so. That ancient house wasn’t so much a “fixer upper” as a rebuilder: for a carpenter who can’t stand still, his wife who loves gardening, her brother (a plumber IIRC) and the brother’s wife, a dream.
The former owner had redone all the carpentry, including wooden floors (with cutouts of the local coat of arms and another local motif), double-glazed windows and new doors. The kitchen could have used redoing and still does (I’ve changed the heating from diesel to piped-in gas, but the appliances are all still good and I’m not planning on doing more until those need changing). They were asking 10-20% less than similarly-sized houses in the same location, which are likely to be a lot less well-insulated than mine.
The notary registering the sale laughed out loud when he asked the price and who was paying which legal expenses: the seller and I answered in stereo and were in perfect agreement. He said that was a first, normally people have forgotten about some expense or other, or have assumed that the other part will pay for everything, or…
Five years later, those other houses are still unsold and my seller’s family has a gorgeous home; nobody would think its roof used to have a hole big enough for a car.
You have to put up $60k just to qualify for the auction. Go to your newspaper and look for the state ads.
I didn’t get as good deal as you when I bought my house. But at closing I noticed the sellers only cleared about $1,700 after Realtor commissions, closing costs (which we had asked for them to cover) and paying off their own mortgage. I did feel kind of bad because the husband’s job had been transferred and they had been trying for six months to unload the house.
Selling a house today is rough.
When I was looking for a house two years ago I found a townhouse that was currently listing at $179,900. There were several places I was also interested in, but while they were nicer they were also more expensive, and I decided to go with the townhouse. When I called the real estate agent, I found that not only had they dropped their asking price to $175,000 right after I had looked at it, but they had just decided to offer a $5000 rebate. I jumped at this, obviously. I later found out that it had been on the market for nearly a year, and the original asking price had been just over $200,000.
Oh, and when the property was reassessed last year at almost $183,000, I used the selling price to request a review, and got it lowered to $173,000.