Some real estate agents are finding first-time buyers and investors competing against each other for moderately priced foreclosures in decent shape. Investors with cash have the upper hand in that fight, said Lenn Harley, broker-owner of Homefinders.com, who works with a network of real estate brokers in Maryland and Virginia.
Lower-priced homes in general - regular sales, not just "distress" transactions - are drawing more interest. That helped the MacDonalds sell their Glen Burnie house. The couple who bought it from them offered the full asking price of $215,000 four days after the MacDonalds' agent - Yungmann - listed the two-bedroom cottage in February.
"We were very surprised," said Amy Lincoln MacDonald, 27, an admissions specialist at Harford Community College. "We thought it was going to take months."
The key was finding the right price. She and husband Paul MacDonald tried marketing the house themselves for $225,000 to no avail before they signed on with an agent. They could afford to drop the price $10,000 because Paul MacDonald bought the house in 2003, before the biggest price run-ups of the housing bubble.
One part of their experience was classic housing slump: They paid 100 percent of their buyers' closing costs and, when they settled in March on a bungalow in Baltimore's Lauraville neighborhood, got $5,000 in closing-cost money themselves.
But they also escalated their bid on the house they bought - an echo of housing markets past. They paid $7,000 more than the bungalow's $148,000 asking price because another buyer made an offer the same day they did.
"I wanted that house," said Amy Lincoln MacDonald. "It was pretty nerve-racking, waiting to hear back."
