Florida Home Seller Drops Asking Price… by $1 Million
A Destin doctor who has had his pulse on the Destin, Florida real estate scene for more than 30 years has slashed the asking price of his bayfront home by $1 million.
Now, the home that Darlene and Dr. Mike Raim live in carries a listing price of $1.79 million. It was $2.79 million.
“We’re trying to get someone’s attention — shock value,” Raim said in an interview.
Raim bought the house at 619 Calhoun Ave. in 1981 and said he paid $131,000. It was built in 1972 and has undergone a couple of remodels. It’s 2,700 square feet, has three bedrooms, two full baths and sits on one acre. Sounds ripe for a Florida mortgage borrower, doesn’t it?
When the Raims put the house on the market in August 2004, it was listed at $1.9 million. But with the Destin real estate market at the time red hot - with Florida housing prices shooting up almost by day and some buyers snapping up homes before the for-sale signs even went up in the front yard - Raim figured the house and land would fetch more.
In March 2005, he upped it to $2.2 million. In the summer of 2005, to $2.49 million. In the summer of 2006, he asked $2.79 million. It’s listed on the tax rolls today at $1.5 million, he said.
Up to now, Raim said most of their would-be buyers were only “tire kickers.”
Pat Fisher, an independent Florida mortgage broker representing the Raims, said they had offers in 2004 and 2005, “but they just didn’t work.” So after nearly three years on the market, Raim said, he needed to do something to call attention to the property.
He’s hopeful his latest price change will be the dealmaker.
Last year, Raim said, a vacant bayfront lot just south of his home on Calhoun sold for $1.15 million, and it was half the size of his. And today, two vacant lots on Joe’s Bayou, less than a mile from his home, are listed at $950,000 each, he said. The beauty of his lot, he said, is that it can be split into two nice-sized waterfront properties, each with about 75 feet on the bay.
On a stroll to the water’s edge one recent evening, mullet jumped through the air, splashing in the shallow water. Men zipped by a little further out on personal watercraft. The western sky was turning color with the sunset as bigger boats made their way home out in Choctawhatchee Bay.
Raim says he couldn’t live anywhere else within the Florida housing market but on the water.
He figures he’ll stick with his $1.79 million price for two months — and then if it does not move, he’ll change his strategy. Plan B may have him building two houses on the property, one for each of his two children, then build a house for him and his wife on a vacant lot he owns on a canal on Holiday Isle. Then there’s a house and land he owns less than a mile away on Calhoun, where he could build.
“Quality pieces of property are hard to come by,” he said. “Everybody wants their lot to be valuable, but nobody wants to pay the taxes.”
Fisher said that at a meeting about commercial real estate a few weeks ago with three bank presidents, “they wanted to let us know they are still lending money but that appraisals are on coming in lower than the contract price.”
She cited an example: “I had a house listed on the bay, $1.75 million, an excellent house. I got a contract, waited two weeks for the appraisal, and it came in 30 percent low. It killed the deal. In my 10 years in real estate, I’ve never had that happen.
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