should I sell my house or keep it?
I’ve just had someone offer to buy my house that I don’t live in (I live abroad) and can’t rent out. they’ve offered £125K (I could probably get £128K if I haggled) the only thing is that since buying the house in 2003 I’ve spent £42K in mortgage payments and still owe £98K. I would therefore loose £12K. I’m coming back the UK in July but not likely to live in my house because my job will take me to another part of the UK. I live in rent free job related accommodation.
The gamble is whether I’m better off to sell or come out of the market and just save (mortgage payments are £8K a year) The house is advertised to be rented at the moment but there are no tenants about. I’ve just completely redecorated – new bathroom kitchen, carpets, etc.
What should I do? sell or keep?
If you just redecorated, then I would hesitate to rent it out. Renters will use up those nice new amenities and you’ll get no enjoyment from them. You will be saddened to move in only to find every nice thing you put in is broken or soiled, smells of smoke, and has tea stains.
On the other hand, you might find one of those rare renters who decide to take care of things as if they owned them. Hard to find one of these, and it is worth the wait.
It sounds like you could suffer the loss easily enough. If you have no intention of living in it, or renting it, do you have family that might enjoy it? Family are worse than renters!
I think you should sell, use the loss to defray taxes, and move on with your life.
sell sell sell and cut your losses
I know it would be very annoying to lost 12k what you need to ask yourself are what are your long term plans? The housing market will probably get worse before it gets better and it will take a few years to turn it around so say in a year you might be lucky to get 100k for it if you decided to sell then which will mean a bigger loss.
But if you are managing the payments ok and you dont need to sell I would probably wait for tenants and rent it out then look at selling when the market picks up if thats what you want to do.
Keep it and let the tenants pay the mortgage for you.
Firstly with the rental side have you looked at maybe that you could be charging to high for the rental, have a look at rental properties in your area, see what they are going for, what they have to offer and see if yours is the same or similar, the same as in selling if you want to break the ceiling price you have to offer something good to tempt people to part with top end prices whether renting or for sale.
Personally i would not sell, as you don’t want to end up loosing money it all very well for people to say"oh well, cut your loses, move on" but its not their 12k that’s being lost.
The property market may well pick up but probably not to the levels of previous years, so i would hang on to it, if you can still afford to pay the mortgage, as in years to come you may be grateful that you did.
If not what about using your house for exchange?