Unable To Sell Our House
In the summer of 2005 my wife and I decided that we wanted to move after some careful thought and prayer. The place we were living was nice, but there was some development going on in the area we weren’t happy with (a new road going through), and we wanted to get out before it happened.
We put our townhouse on the market, and began dreaming about moving into a new place. We eventually settled on building a new home about 2 miles away since we liked the area, and we put some money down on purchasing the home. Our closing on the new house was dependent on us selling our townhouse, and even though they had done a contingent start on our house, we weren’t 100% sure if we were going to be able to sell our townhouse. If we were unable to sell the townhouse we wouldn’t be able to move.
1 months passed, then two. Our new house was quickly going up and we knew we would have to sell our townhouse soon, or we’d have to nix the deal. We only received a couple of lowball offers on our townhouse, and things were starting to get desperate.
Finally with the closing a couple of weeks away on our newly built home, we had to walk away from the deal. We hadn’t been able to sell the townhouse.
Reasons Why Houses Don’t Sell
Over at Money Blue Book yesterday they talked about this kind of a situation where you might be having trouble selling your home. The post is called, “Top 6 Reasons And Considerations Why Your Home Isn’t Selling, And Ways You Can Improve“. In the post, they talk about some of those reasons why we might not have been able to sell, I think three of them really applied to our situation:
- Your Home Asking Price May Be Set Too High: We think this may have been our main problem, we were asking too much for our house, and the area and market that we were in couldn’t support the price we were asking. Little did we know that the market would be dropping even further in the next couple of years.
- The Real Estate Market Is Very Slow And Conditions For Selling Are Bad: I think there was a bit of a slowdown at the time, and there was a glut of homes on the market. It definitely didn’t help.
- Your Home Is Located In a Poor Location: I don’t think the location of the home was necessarily all that bad, however, some people were a bit leery of the new road that was going through. Obviously we were too because we were moving.
Go over to moneybluebook.com and read the whole thing, it makes a lot of good points.
Things Happen For A Reason
So after the deal fell through, we were disappointed, and wondered why we had felt lead to move, when we weren’t going to be able to. A verse that comes to mind as a reassurance was Jeremiah 29:11:
For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
We knew that although we were disappointed, God would work things for the good. We don’t always understand God’s timing, or why he allows storms in our life, but we had faith that things would work out.
Well we waited until the spring of 2006 to try selling our townhouse again. We did the same thing as the previous year – we put our house on the market at a slightly lower price, and waited for it to sell. In the meantime we began building another new house with the same builder as we had in 2005. To our surprise, when we signed a contract on the exact same model of house, the price had dropped by $5000 dollars, and because of that we were able to add some options we hadn’t been able to the previous year. After all that we still came out with a lower price.
Within a month or so of closing our townhouse finally sold! To our surprise we got the price we were asking!
God provides – it may not always be in our timing, but he has our best interests at heart. He knew that he could save us thousands of dollars by having us buy a new home 1 year later, and he made it happen. He even allowed us to sell before the housing bubble burst in 2007.
Today looking back my wife and I feel very blessed, and we know that God’s timing is perfect (unlike our own) and that he provides.
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