This morning there is just one sale on the local mls “hotsheet” and I think it’s worth taking a few minutes to detail it here on the South Bend Area Blog.
It’s 52280 Brendon Hills Drive, a nice house, although it doesn’t much stand out from the pack. It is exactly the kind of neutral suburban home with broad appeal that has sold well during the recent boom market.
It has 4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, almost 3,000 square feet plus a finished basement, sunroom and attached 2-car garage. Inside there’s a fireplace, 9 foot ceilings and an island kitchen. It was built in 1992, in one of Granger’s nicer neighborhoods, Brendon Hills. Realty Trac doesn’t show any auctions, foreclosures or other comp-killers in the neighborhood to bring the prices down, so there’s no direct reason to think it would be an especially slow sale.
However, here’s the sales history:
sold 7/31/1997 for $214,900
sold 3/01/2000 for $215,000
sold 4/22/2008 for $210,000
The owners listed 52280 Brendon Hills Drive for sale 7/7/2007 for $256,000. They sat on the market for over nine months while they tried six different prices and two agents before coming to a price that a buyer found acceptable, and below what they paid for the house.
Even that’s not as steep a price drop as their neighbor, 52190 Brendon Hills, which was listed 4/20/2007 for $309,900 and sold 12/21/2007 for $230,450. This neighbor is one of nine Brendon Hills homes that sold while 52280 was on the market. Several of those homes were substantially similar to 52280 Brendon Hills.
Obviously you should limit the conclusions you draw from the sale of a single house, but I think it’s safe to say that if you want a quick sale you need to give buyers a reason to choose your home. Make it a deal they can’t pass by, or make them fall in love with it. Whatever else you do, make it visible online and viewable on short notice.
Looks like the market is returning to “normal”. There simply is no housing shortage in our area with plenty of new developments which keep a lid on home prices. It is surprising to see that 10 years later the home is worth less but I’d have to see the conditions and decor to make a judgment. If it needs $20-30K in updates then the price is not surprising but if it was move in ready without issues, the price seems lower than I would have thought. If the house was empty and the owning was funding two mortgages then I can see why they would want to get rid of it.
I hope you make “Behind the Sale” a regular feature. It would be interesting to see which homes appreciated well and which ones did not.
In this case it seems to me that the original buyers overpaid by quite a bit in 1997. $210,000 should have gone a lot further back then.
It’s tough to say without knowing more about how nice the inside ofthe house is, but a brand new $210k home in 1997 should definitely have had a 3-car garage anyway.
I still can’t believe that they were only able to get $210 for it this year though. Especially since all of the realtors around here push out-of-towners toward Granger. Maybe NDTom is onto something and the inside decor was really bad.