The FSOWannabe Housing Market

The Mrs. and I are currently in the process of selling our home in Charlotte. It's a beautiful (if somewhat dated) home in a Mayberry-ish neighborhood near uptown (for those familiar with Charlotte, our house is in Plaza-Midwood close to the Van Landingham). It's somewhat hard to say goodbye to that house. We were married in Charlotte and had our reception at the Van Landingham. It's where we brought our firstborn home from the hospital. We have a lot of great memories there as newlyweds and as new parents. We kept the house when we moved to Atlanta because we thought our time here in the ATL would be a short one with us returning to Charlotte within a year or two. Unfortunately, the tanking of the economy had an adverse effect on a lot of business plans (not just ours).

But sadly, keeping an extra home and dealing with renters was (A) a pain and (B) bleeding us bit by bit financially. And we're realists (at least when it comes to finance). It's pretty clear that Charlotte, more so than other parts of the country, has been particularly hard hit by the economy (official unemployment in Charlotte is close to 13% - God knows how bad it really is). There are entire neighborhoods in the suburbs that are now bank-owned because everyone was foreclosed on. Our neighborhood, which isn't that big a neighborhood, had over 90 homes on the market with a 12% under contract rate in January (no idea what the actual sale rate was). So we interviewed a lot of realtors, seriously assessed the housing market in Charlotte (two word summary - it sucks) and put the house on the market at a painful price. Three days later, we got an offer.

So now we're dealing with the buyers and I can't tell if they are naive or just jerks. We really gave them a good price on the house, but they are trying to nickel and dime us on crazy repairs. And I mean crazy. We have a kitchen island and apparently it has a wobble (news to us - it didn't wobble when we lived there - thanks sucky tenants). We've offered to fix it, but no, that would be too sensible. They want a new island. Their inspector found old raccoon poo on the roof. They want us to hire animal control to hunt down and trap the offending animal. Really. There are 5 places on the entire house where there is some wood rot. None of it is bigger than 2 inches in diameter. They want it repaired and...wait for it...a $3000 credit for new paint.

We've tried to ask their agent to control his clients. But apparently he's given up on talking reason to them. He just forwards their requests, I guess because he's embarrassed by them.

We've been more than reasonable. And the sad thing is, if we didn't want to sell the house so badly, we could be very, very, very good at being unreasonable back.* But enough is enough. So we told the buyers that we were tired of their crazy and they needed to find another house to buy. Hopefully, they'll crumble on their stupidity, quit wasting our time, buy the dang house and be happy that they are getting a great deal.

*Mrs. FSOWannabe has done a very good job at restraining my more vicious tendencies with respect to negotiating - I know, I'm all nice on the bloggity-blog, but I was a finance attorney for a decade and old habits die hard.