Red Door by Stephen Heron
Last time, we talked about selling vacant properties. Let’s talk about the opposite now: selling occupied properties.
“How is it possible to sell an inhabited property?” you ask. Well, if you’ve been renting one of your places out lately, you may run into a specific set of troubles when deciding to sell it.
Getting over the hurdle
Knock Knock
Firstly, your tenant is the rightful inhabitant of your house or condo. He or she has created and arranged his or her personal space in the rooms being rented from you, and he or she is counting on using it until the lease is over. Tenants usually have no interest or motivation to help you with your transaction — that is, unless you have been a terrible landlord lately.
For these reasons, you can’t rely on your tenant to tidy up the property and clear out when a visitor-buyer is about to come over. All the things that your family is happy to do to speed up the sale become difficult when there is another person or a family living in the property.
The Recipe
Fortunately, some tenants will be happy to help you out if they can because not all people are evil and some are even quite altruistic. In either case, it may be appropriate to go easy on your tenant and consult your plans of putting the home up for sale with him or her ahead of time. You never know whether he or she may be willing to purchase the place to begin with.
Being open with your tenant is important, and adding in a pinch of motivation never hurts. Offer your tenant partial rent relief. If he or she is co-operative, maybe you can give him or her a 50% discount for the month of sale.
Another strategy is to ask your tenants to leave. This tactic may come into play when your buyers are planning to move in right after the purchase. Again, try to approach your tenant as soon as possible, so that the tenant has enough time to find a replacement home. A little rent relief may come in handy in this situation as well, especially if the lease is not about to expire.
Keep in mind, however, that your tenant has the right to stay until the lease expires, if he or she so decides. And that brings us to the next point…
The Obligations
When selling a home in which a tenant lives, the most important tasks on your to-do list are to respect his or her right to live in the property for the duration of the lease and to inform buyers that there is a tenant living in the home that they are buying.
Failure to inform either interested party may cost you dearly. Your tenant may sue you for breach of contract if you refuse to compensate him or her for withdrawing early, and your buyers will not be very happy if they arrive to the occupied house with their suitcases.
In summary: be nice, and you will get the most out of your investment property.
Please leave us a comment if you have personally experienced this situation from either point of view. We all want to hear about it.
If you’ve experienced the process of selling a home within the past year, you are more than likely trying to figure out how you can get that year of your life back. Today’s marketplace has presented home sellers with an interesting set of challenges that can make selling a home quite the stressful situation.
If one wants to buy a house in Canada then one should have very clear idea about the housing prices in Canada so the best option to look for housing predictions is Canadian Real Estate Association. This organization has an extensive capacity of activity and accountability with the intentions which allows it to calculate housing statistics better than some smaller associations.