Author: JOSIAH MURDAUGH

Here is the current picture, with the caveat that county-level data lags by a month or two and these figures get stale faster than anybody likes. What cash home buyers in Lake City are seeing on the ground matches what the published numbers say: a market that has not fallen off, but has slowed enough … Continued

Four different people will give you four different numbers for the same house, and all four can be defensible. That is not a scam, it is four methods answering slightly different questions. If you are trying to work out whether you have been offered a fair cash offer for a house in Lake City, or … Continued

You already know what the smell tells you before you have opened the second door. Somewhere between the third room and the garage you stop taking photos and start doing math you do not like. Deciding whether to sell a house with bad tenants in Lake City usually starts right here, on this walkthrough. The … Continued

Land is the one category where selling it yourself genuinely competes with hiring an agent. If you want to sell vacant land in Lake City, the buyer is often a neighbor, a hunter who has leased it, or somebody who has driven past it for years, and no listing photo was ever going to find … Continued

Owner financing in Lake City comes up more here than it does in most Florida markets, and for a specific reason: a lot of what people own in Columbia County is hard for a bank to lend on. Manufactured homes, raw acreage, houses on well and septic with no comparable sales nearby. When conventional financing … Continued

Stand at the top of the I-75 ramp at Exit 435 on a weekday afternoon and count trucks. You will lose track. Two interstates cross within a few miles of downtown, and almost everything about the local economy follows from that one fact of geography, including how often somebody has to sell a house after … Continued

The house is usually the largest thing two people own together and the hardest thing to divide, because you cannot cut it in half. If you need to sell a house during a divorce in Lake City, the good news is that the process itself is fairly mechanical once a few questions get answered. The … Continued

Most people asking about capital gains tax selling a house in Lake City end up owing nothing, and spend a lot of energy worrying about it first. The federal home sale exclusion is generous, Florida has no state income tax, and the majority of ordinary sales here fall well inside the lines. That said, the … Continued

Leaning buyer’s market, but not dramatically, and not everywhere. Anyone trying to sell a house fast in Columbia County FL is working in a market that has cooled from a year ago without falling apart. That distinction matters, because “cooling” and “crashing” lead to very different decisions. Here is what the numbers actually say, what … Continued

Most people who want to sell a house that needs repairs in Lake City have already gotten one contractor quote, sat down, and gone quiet for a few weeks. That reaction is reasonable. Repair estimates on an older North Florida house have a way of arriving with an extra digit. The useful question is not … Continued

Usually yes. If you want to sell a manufactured home in Lake City and the home still has a title in your name and was never legally converted into real property, you can sell it on its own, and the paperwork looks more like selling a vehicle than selling a house. If the title was … Continued

Six percent. That is the number that starts almost every conversation about how to sell a house without a realtor in Lake City, and it is a reasonable place to start. Six percent of a sale feels like an enormous amount of money to hand over for something you could plausibly do yourself, and sometimes … Continued

Josiah was mowing a yard on a job in Watertown when he decided the waist-high lot next door was dragging the whole street down, so he cut that one too. Somebody called the police. There is now a report on file clarifying that the suspicious activity was a man with a mower raising property values. … Continued

Losing a job puts the house on the table in a way nothing else does. The mortgage was fine on Friday and it is a problem on Monday, and the pressure to do something immediately is enormous. If you are already thinking “I need to sell my house fast in Lake City,” hold that thought … Continued

Figuring out what to do with an inherited house in Lake City is rarely a real estate question first. It is a paperwork question, a family question, and a grief question, usually in that order, and the house just sits there in the middle of it collecting mail. The good news is that the sequence … Continued