Economics, Shneconomics

My house, which I plan to sell, has some problems. Everyone's advising me not to fix them, but to simply discount its price accordingly. Let the next owner fix it! And this strikes me as unbelievably poor advice.

Say you own a car worth $30,000. And say - for whatever reason, I'm not judging - a large mammal died in it, and the corpse wasn't discovered for a few (summer) days. And say you got an estimate from an industrial cleaning service for $11,000 to replace fabrics and expunge stink. And say you didn't want to lay out that money. So you put the car for sale for $19,000. Let the next guy do it!

You will not sell the car. You won't sell it at $15,000, either, or even at $10,000. At maybe $7500, there's a ghost of a chance you'll connect with a crazed bargain hunter who'll crack open the door, smell the bouquet, and holler "I'll take it!" But if you're lucky enough to find this buyer (you won't), it will only be from loads of advertising and months of waiting. Most people don't want your corpse car at any price. Car buyers want a nice car, not a corpse car.

My house's problems aren't quite so bad. Some asbestos insulation in the basement ($10K), lots of peeling lead paint on the exterior ($18K), and a stalled bathroom renovation ($8K). Lowering my sale price by $36K won’t cut it, because home buyers want a nice house, not an asbestos house.

Even if I discounted it to an irrisistibly low price, only a slim fraction of buyers want a PROJECT. So my house would sit on the market for months, acquiring the stink of disinterest. If I were very lucky, I’d sell the house at a 2X discount ($72K) to its problems.

Economics assures us that value is value, period. So a discount should balance out an inadequacy. This is nonsense, conceived by dry eggheads with no understanding of actual human beings.