SD_R that sounds familiar. When it’s time, it’s time. Hopefully you can get somewhat close to rental value after taxes. Maybe bargain out one more year to gain a little more negative on the market. But ultimately, if you are looking for 10K lot and an area with setbacks that are more than three feet and haven’t been McMansionized, when it’s for sale, it may just be time.
Your target market doesn’t have a comparable rental and that’s a bit of a crux. Sure, you can get the same square footage, maybe a big yard, but likely a different neighborhood, busy street, etc. Or worse, you can settle for “good enough”… If you look at it by taking a similar set of houses and start adding slight premiums in for updating, yard size, neighborhood desire, slow street,… you probably get pretty close especially if you find a seller that realizes it’s 2007 and not 2005+25%.
I’m bearish, and I think the market justifiably has a long way to fall, but that is only because so much of the market are literally, just glorified rentals (condos, townhomes) or cookie cutter clustered tract homes with a 1000 identical within the square mile of the HOA.
Properties that aren’t that, will fall, but before they do, every move-up buyer that wants out of the cookie cutter is going to go for it. If the financing works, it’s happiness and certainty versus uncertainty and some probability distribution centered around a couple hundred thousand of extra cost stretched over 30 years.
I’m a pretty simple guy, I always focus on two extremes: the minimum I need and has everything I want. “Good enough” always tends to get me in a spot that isn’t satisfactory and just burns my time, money and energy. If it doesn’t have everything I want, there’s no point in having more than the minimum I need.
