Sunday, March 14, 2010

To Market to Market

So the Mrs. and I have an extra house in Charlotte that we're finally putting on the market. Over the last couple of months we've spent a lot of time interviewing realtors, painters, landscapers and handymen in order to get the house in decent shape and up for sale. It should be listed sometime this week.

It's bittersweet. We both love the home and our neighbors there. The house is smack in the middle of a Mayberry-ish neighborhood. Everyone knows everyone. People sit outside and talk to each other (or even better, bring beers over to drink on the porch). Halloween is absolutely sick there with most of the city bringing their kids to our neighborhood to do the trick-or-treating (if you don't have 10lbs of candy each Halloween, you will run out - the first year we were there we were out of candy in literally an hour). A great neighborhood with great people.

In fact, the only reason we still have the house, three years after we moved to Atlanta, was in the hope that we would have an opportunity to move back. Sadly, we came to a decision at the end of last year that it would be best to go ahead and sell the house. The economy is not coming back as soon as we had hoped (and from my perspective, doesn't actually seem to be coming back much at all), and our areas of legal specialization are hard to find in Charlotte now that the crash of the last couple of years has effectively destroyed the structured finance industry.

So rather than keeping the house and dealing with renters (which has been hit or miss), not to mention dealing with the burden of carrying the extra mortgage, we're going to sell the house. We'll probably take a decent loss since the last two years in Charlotte has seen mass layoffs at the two major employers in town, Bank of America and Wachovia (now owned by Wells Fargo). There are tons and tons of houses on the market, plus far too many foreclosures from people laid off that have just walked from their homes, which doesn't look good for a fast sale or breaking even close to even. But, frankly, that's okay. Sometimes it's better to take the hit in order to focus on the future.

2 comments:

I'll Take Mine... said...

Thanks for the german tv link you sent. My husband is most appreciative. They enunciate well too, so that helps.

fsowannabe said...

Glad it was helpful!