Well, moral of story is One man’s shack is another man’s mansion

Or Square footage ain’t nuthin but a number.

Our Meadowbrook tudor (the 2/1 with an attached studio) has almost 1500 square feet inside (1250 in house and 250 studio) and 400 unfinished basement. Two extreme examples that still leaves me scratching my head on what should be “comfortable space”

Party 1: Not enough space for a single person who currently lives in apartment with no pets. Loved the house, but too much furniture & books.

Party 2: Spent 1.5 days trying to convince us that his family of 7 could fit ENTIRELY in the 2 BD house (all kids too small to be in studio unattended). Eventually had a self-proclaimed “reality check” about it, but still…….

In both cases, the prospective tenants were very nice and professional, but I’m learning to never second guess someone’s need for space.

Lesley,

Feel free to “bogart my post” with funny stories, anytime.

Little small for us, or I might have taken a look.

That is my house (the meadowbrook one). It is not your cookie-cutter house in any form. That can be good or bad, depending on your tastes. The configuration is weird in that it is a 2BD with an attached studio (but the flow throughout the house is actually quite nice). Between the 2BD-studio mix, and its odd placement in a bizarre-shaped lot makes it unusual indeed. For 95% of the prospective buyers, one or more of those features is viewed as a negative in this market. For us, those features were actually negligable or even a positive. It just takes that special buyer. Unfortunately, with so few buyers out there (especially in that intermediate price range), it could be along time coming. So, we opted to consider renting it while we relocated to CA for a new job.

BTW- Ardell and her partner have done ALL of the showings…at least 3-4 meetings a week (and often at short notice). When it comes to $ paid per unit effort, I think rentals might be something of a charity case. (THANKS ARDELL & KIM!). I’m hoping Ardell will take some time out her uber busy schedule to write a post on the pros and cons of taking a listing as a rental. But yes, we seem to have more luck in the rental market. But then again, the quality of rentals is usually different than homes for sale, and it really is a very nice house.

Cute house, but weird configuration. Might work better as a rental, or find that buyer that has a situation where it would work.

The # of pending sales on Residential is enormous relative to homes sold YTD, and the MPPSF is so much lower than closed transactions, that I have to believe that “in Escrow” has a bunch of short sales in that stat that never do close, and end up sold at auction.

That sounds like a reasonable hypothesis to me.

Relocating to area.
Seller coming back to live in their home so tenant has to leave.
Seller decided to expand and remodel the rental and sell it (before the market gets worse)
Trying to get closer to…work, school, crew at 4 a.m..

It sure makes the phone ring of the hook to have a rental listing. A really nice one anyway.