Well once again my wife and I tried to work out a deal for “the albatross house” (as my Realtor likes to call it) in the mountains with its owners. It’s been about six months since we last placed an offer on it and the owners had lowered their asking price to $35K below our last offer. You’d be forgiven to think that makes it a no-brainer for us to offer the asking price and be done with it. Unfortunately, the housing market has suffered quite a bit in the last 6 months and the last time we looked at the house, we were blown away by all the positives that we tended to overlook the problems.

So we looked at the house more closely… a lot more. We started noticing that none of the remodeling work or materials were good. Marble and slate tiles had cracks and didn’t have clean edges and then were installed by clearly someone who didn’t know what they were doing. The new exterior paint has an uneven color and is beginning to chip. We’re also beginning to see signs of dry rot where they just filled in the rot with filler and painted over it. Rumor has it that the deck off the upstairs living room was originally decorative and they made it functional- who knows if it’s safe or not. The list goes on and on…

So after some thought, we decided the house is worth quite a bit less then our last offer… enough that it was clear we weren’t going to come in with an offer the the owner would accept so we just walked away. Honestly, I seriously doubt they’ll get any offers matching their asking price, so it looks condemned to sit on the market for a few more months.