What If Our Home Doesn’t Sell? Should We Turn It Into A Rental?

It’s been nearly four months and our house hasn’t sold yet.

We’ve had exactly 30 showings and great reviews, yet no offers.

Not even a single lowball offer.

Our home is priced quite competitively and below comparables, so we are afraid to lower the price any further.

We are already going to lose money with what our home is priced at now so we are currently wondering about other possible options. I knew selling a home would be stressful, but I didn’t realize that it would be this stressful. Many ideas have been going through my mind but it’s hard to decide what the best decision is.

Below are some of the things we have been thinking about possibly doing since our house hasn’t sold yet.

Make a temporary decision.

There are many decisions we could make just for the time being.

We could take our home off the market temporarily to see if our neighborhood experiences a rebound. Temporarily doing this could be risky though as our neighborhood could lose value over time instead of gaining value.

However, there is a chance that our neighborhood could go up, which would mean that we might not lose as much money if we were to rent it out while we waiting for it to rebound.

Move back home.

Of course, one of our options is just to move back home since our house hasn’t sold yet. Right now we are just renting in Colorado, so we do have the option to move back home at the end of our lease.

This isn’t the ideal situation as we didn’t move ALL the way out here just to move back to St. Louis one year later. However, this is most likely our best choice as well as the most realistic one if it doesn’t sell.

Moving back home would also get rid of a lot of the worries that go along with the options below.

Rent our home to long-term renters.

We are debating renting out our home on a long-term basis. We could most likely find long-term renters somewhat easily and I definitely think we could charge more than our mortgage payment each month.

We wouldn’t get rich from renting it out to long-term renters, but it could be enough to cover our mortgage and possibly one day even pay it off and keep it as a rental forever. There also wouldn’t be a ton of work involved, at least not when compared to renting it out to short-term renters.

The major downsides of renting out our home on a long-term basis would be if we had bad renters and the fact that we would be long distance landlords. We might need a property management company and if we did that then the revenue from the monthly rent would be much lower.

Rent our home to short-term renters.

On the other hand, we could also think about renting out our home on a short-term basis on a website such as Airbnb, VRBO, or Homeaway. This would also allow us to have a place to come back to, which would be very nice.

The major downside to doing this is that we are so far away and it would be hard to manage something like this from states away. This is because someone would have to clean up after each stay, restock items such as toilet paper, and so on. I’ve also searched and there are no companies in our area that offer property management for vacation rentals either.

Drop the price significantly.

We originally priced the home below what we bought it for back in 2009, and we’ve dropped it since it’s been listed as well.

The last and least fun option would be to just drop the price until someone bites, but that would mean losing a significant amount of money.

However, the plus side would mean that the house would hopefully sell quicker. This is not an option I would ever want to take but it does exist…

Have you sold a house before? Did you ever feel panicky about whether it would sell or not? What would you do if there were no offers on a home you had for sale?