woodworm

I am wondering how big a financial loss people on here are willing to take , when it comes to selling their properties back in their home country in order to move to Canada.
I have been living in Canada for 5 years , but have kept my property back home up to now, just to be on the safe side (you never know if you want / need to come back to it, do you?)
Now it has become necessary for me to sell it, because I want to use the money elsewhere and I have an offer on it, but it is waaaay lower than what I had expected, (of course), so I am just curious what kind of loss (percentage) in relation to your purchase price you guys would be willing to accept to fulfill your dream?

Cassie 10000

We had to drop 25,000 pounds in the end from the original starting price but I think that is peanuts compared to others on BE

albertabound

Looks like we are gonna be around £30000.00. But it is not money we ever had.
It was never in our account. It is a difficult decision but we will try and re coup some over in Canada if we can.

Tangram

£32,000 in August 2007. That was £10,000 below what we paid for it. Worth it ( if I don't think about it ) to get the family together before the big crunch hit.

nikki dreaming

We too were about £30,000 on the original asking price, as a percentage we took about 13% drop

We took the view, that in the current market we are lucky to have the offer, whilst the amount we have lost would have been a huge help in Canada, we still have a small amount to enable us to make the move and we are going to go for it.

We were never going to be in a position of being mortgage free anyway and will be looking to rent initially. Nor will we be out buying brand new cars when we arrive, but hopefully we can make this work.

The reason for our move is beyond material things and about lifestyle choice so hopefully we will still be able to achieve this and as somebody else mentioned up thread the money was never really there anyway

Just my thoughts

brit_kiwi

Not quite the same situation, but we lost about $25,000 Canadian (about 10%) in order to upgrade to a much nicer condo.

Sold one place in Toronto, buying another and as the one we're buying is much more expensive, we reckon we're saving way more on the one we're buying (the previous owner paid $70,000 more for it than we did!). We plan to be there for a long time so obviously we're hoping the market will bounce back and we'll make money in the long run.

gibsonslanding

£125K.....yep, you read that right......one hundred and twenty five thousand pounds........was never ours to lose though, as we know what we bought it for, we know what we spent on it and we made a profit........

Steve_P

So if you made a profit you did not lose anything.

You may not have made what you wanted or could have if sold at a different time but you very definitely didn't lose anything.

Tangram

Good point, and valid.

Hobbess

Interesting discussion as I'm in a similar situation to the OP. Looking at selling our place back in Glasgow within the next 12 months to finance the next steps over here. However, the market right now isn't there so holding off as long as we can though are still realistically going to be looking at a loss albeit hopefully small.

One thing not mentioned yet is that the exchange rate also takes a chunk out of the value too, it's $1.8 to £1 right now. I'd feel better about getting less value for the house if I knew I could bring it over at $2 to the £1 or better.

gibsonslanding

that all depends on what you were looking at bringing with you right?....no, we didn't lose anything as it wasn't ours, so no, we wern't into negative equity....not sure that the thread is about negative equity, right?......

if it's about negative equity, then the question should be, what did you really go through to move heaven and earth to get here, no?

so, in our situation.....yep, we 'lost' a hell of a lot.......YOU? or is it only the 'poor' who are eligible to have deemed to have 'lost' money.......

Steve_P

Actually the thread title does mean negative equity it states how much did you "lose" not how much profit didn't you make.

You can only have lost money if you sold for less than you paid plus what you put into it in upgrades.

You can't say I could have sold it a year earlier for 125,000 more so we lost that amount, that's not a loss it's unrealised profit.

Rich, middle class, poor has got nothing to do with it.

Tangram stated it correctly he lost money on his home he sold it for 10,000 less than he paid for it.

Novocastrian

WTF is that supposed to mean?

purple80

We put UK house on the market February 2008, sold January 2009, we sold the house for £30,000 less than the asking price.

We had equity in the property and it has still left us with a deposit for over here. We have also covered every cost involved with moving to Canada, have no debt at all, and own two cars that should last us the next 5 years.

So in reality we lost nothing, as what we lost was just equity and not tangible, or even ours.

Would we do the same thing again.....YEP.

clairemarie70

hi, my house was on the market for 14 months..it was origanally on the market for 230,000 and i just sold it for 158,000..yes i lost money but i was just glad to sell it knowing what the housing market has been like and still is..my estate agent told me to be realistic and its only worth what someone is willing to pay.