Seattle Real Estate:

This is the fourth post in a seven part series called Four Reasons You Don’t Want to Buy a Bank Owned Home…and Three Reasons You Do.

We’ve already covered two reasons you don’t want to buy a bank owned home:
1. “Bank Owned Homes Almost Always Seem to Start Overpriced”
2. “Banks Don’t Know Anything About the House They’re Selling”

and one reason why you might:
1. ”Play Your Cards Right and You Can Buy a Great Home Cheap”

What’s another reason why you might want to consider purchasing a Seattle area Bank Owned home?

2. An Opportunity For a Fixer Upper at a Realistic Price

Some homebuyers are in the market specifically for homes that aren’t in good condition.  Why?  They might be in a construction trade, or maybe they’re just handy, perhaps they’ve watched too much HGTV and are enthralled with the idea of making over a house. 

What handy buyers understand is that if they are willing to do, or administrate, some improvement projects they can get a house customized to their taste for the same or less than they might have paid for a home that is move in ready.

Fixer Uppers, or Fixers as some people call them, are not for everyone.  There is a lot of appeal in a home that is spic and span and ready to go.  We once had a client very soberly explain, “Our first house was a fixer upper.  We thought we were fixer-upper people, it turns out that we’re not.” 

Here is the problem with many homes on the market that need work…the reason they need work is that the homeowner was having financial difficulty keeping it up, or can’t afford to invest in components or aesthetics that need updating.  When it comes time to sell, the sellers don’t have much money to negotiate on price, or discount for necessary repairs. 

This isn’t the case for all homes, some are in rough shape because:

• they were rented to careless tenants
• some homeowners seem blissfully unaware that Eau de Fido, complete with gnawed woodwork and claw-gouged hardwoods do a Fixer Upper make
• the home is immaculately kept but in desperate need of updating.  This is often seen in estate sale situations.

 I once read a listing that delicately described a home with an avocado kitchen and orange shag carpeting as “frozen in time”, but I digress…

Banks don’t have emotional investment in homes, and are often (eventually) willing to bow to the indications of the market and accept a lower price for a home in a condition to warrant it.  Since some of the sellers mentioned above are, sadly, how the home became bank-owned in the first place, there can be opportunity to score what we call in Realtor-ese a “diamond in the rough” with “tons of potential” lacking only “your finishing touches” which are “limited only by your imagination”. 

Stay tuned for the next entry in the series about Bank Owned properties, “The 3rd of 4 Reasons You Do Not Want to Buy A Bank Owned Home“.

In fact, while you’re at it why not subscribe to the Rion Seattle Real Estate Blog RSS feed, start searching Seattle real estate, or contact us to get started in your search.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Buyers, Kathryn Explains. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.