“a reasonable price alone isnt getting it done these days. crappy houses just arent selling well in this kind of market. W/O the prospect of appreciation people want something turnkey.”
since appreciation is out of the picture for the time being, “reasonable price” will have to reflect that.
i would think that in an appreciating market, a crappy house will still have a smaller price tag than an equal but pristine home given the same time period.
it seems however, that you’re alluding to two different markets; the flipper market and the residence market. “reasonable” is going to mean two different things for those two groups. for either group, “reasonable” is gonna be low for either the depreciating market conditions or for “real”, non speculative valuation.
alot of the people that post up “my wife is hounding me to buy a house, should i?” are in the residence position, people who are willing to take a loss in the short term for ownership. they’re actually looking at the house, the neighborhood, etc and not particularly dollar signs. a crappy house for them that would require work is going to be worth far less simply because they don’t have the connections, the contractors to do the labor cheap/shoddy (edit: if they even have any vague notions of how much the work will cost; ignorance probably leads to exaggeration), not to mention whether or not “crappy” relates to the surrounding area… you’re obviously not going to sell an upscale 2+2+dog a shack in city heights no matter what the price.
