If you’re going through a difficult divorce and trying to figure out what to do about your unwanted real estate, then keep reading this blog post to give you our best suggestions about selling your house while divorcing in Atlanta. There are tons of options to seek forth and an increasingly more popular one is searching out Cash Home Buyers Atlanta, or rather, home buyers that pay cash for homes in Atlanta. Keep reading further for more
Divorce can be challenging and emotional, especially if you and your ex-partner are divorcing because you are constantly angry with one another and don’t see eye-to-eye anymore. Yet, in the midst of this terribly difficult situation, you might be like other divorcing couples who own a house and are trying to figure out how to go about selling your house while divorcing in Atlanta. Here are our best strategies and ideas to help you navigate the real estate portion of your divorce as carefully and efficiently as possible.
Houses In Divorce Can Be Complicated
During a divorce, the two parties seek to split their assets in half. For some assets are liquid (such as money), it’s very easy to do. For other assets, including real estate, it’s much harder to do because how do you split a house in half? It’s one asset that derives its value from being whole, and it’s usually a structure built on a plot of land, so it’s not going anywhere.
Since cutting the house down the middle isn’t an option, should one party get it or the other? And maybe in some divorces, one party might be invited to take the house only if they can pay for it (which is a massive expense a time that people rarely want to incur such expenses). This leaves both parties with some serious questions to ask themselves, like “Can I afford to take on this home by myself?”
Here’s How To Split The Real Estate Asset
One option might be to try and keep the home. Some couples, when they are still in good standing with one another, will keep the house as a rental. This works out great if you got the home at a good price and what you make in gross rent per month outweights the mortgage, taxes, insurance, utilities and other amenitites, as well as putting away 5% for Capital Expenditures, 5% for Vacancy, 5% for repairs and maintenance as well as 5%-10% for property management, unless one of you decides to manage the property yourself. Once you start to add in all the costs and unknown variables of owning a rental home, the numbers might not look to good, especially if your business parter on the home is your ex-wife, whom you’re currently divorcing!
In most cases, and in our honest opinion, the best way to split the real estate asset is to sell it:
The property itself might have some expenses incurred during the sales process, or there might be outstanding bills, or there might still be a partial outstanding mortgage on the property. So the two divorcing parties should probably just sell the property and direct their attorneys to apply the money earned from the equity to any outstanding debts.
The remaining amount can then be split between each party, with each party getting an agreed-upon percentage (such as 50/50).
But this begs the question — how do you sell the property?
The Fastest Way To Sell A Divorce House
When it comes time to sell, most people think of selling through a real estate agent. Unfortunately there’s a few problems with this:
- the real estate agent, in lots of cases, will ask/make the owners pay out-of-pocket to fix up the property first — but who pays for that? To get your house to sell well on market, it’s got to be HGTV ready.
- the agent will then list the house, which can take 3-6 months to sell (sometimes longer). Can either party in this divorce wait that long? Taking several months to officially sell just ties you two closer together for longer.
- the agent will then involve both parties in the negotiation with the buyer and there is A LOT of paperwork to shuffle back and forth.
This is a costly and time-consuming way to sell, and it can actually make the divorce proceedings so much worse. If you and your soon-to-be ex-partner don’t see eye to eye on all of the above matters, you’re really opening up a can of worms that could ultimately make the entire divorce process so much worse. Don’t you just want to be rid of the the person you’re attempting to divorce?
Fortunately, there’s another way to sell and that’s to sell your house to a real estate buying firm (which is what we do here at ATL Cash Home Buyers). The real estate buying firm will buy your house quickly, for cash, in as-is condition (and as a bonus, there are never any commissions or fees to pay). You don’t have to clean up or fix up the property and the sale can be completed in days, not months, with very little paperwork.
If you’re going through divorce and want to just be done with it and move on with your life, just reach out to us and tell us about the house you want to sell. We specialize in buying divorce houses and we can help you expedite your divorce by buying this house from you.