Selling your home in a down market is tough. It took us 7 months from the time we listed our house until the time we finalize the sale, and we lost just over $50,000 on the transaction. I have conflicting thoughts about losing this much money. Obviously, no one sets out to lose money when they buy a home, and no one feels good about it. But at the same time, I realize it’s probably not as bad as it seems.
Thoughts on losing money on our house
We knew we would lose money on the transaction, so we were prepared for it. Being mentally and emotionally prepared to lose money is important. In the grand scheme of things, we just considered losing money on our home a sunk cost and decided to move on. Here are some factors which made the loss easier to swallow:
We had enough equity to cover our losses. Losing money isn’t fun. Writing someone a check when you’ve already lost a lot of money is even worse. Thankfully, we had enough equity to cover our losses, so we didn’t have to write a check at closing. We put down 20% of the purchase price when we bought the home, and we paid extra on our mortgage payments. This combination ensured we would receive a small check when we sold our home instead of being upside down on our mortgage.
If we didn’t buy, we would have paid rent. Some people say renting is throwing away money, but I disagree. Many people who rented during the real estate bubble avoided taking substantial losses when they had to move. And in our case, we may have actually come out slightly ahead, depending on how you slice the numbers. We lived in our home for just over 5 years. If we would have “thrown away money” on rent for 5 years, we probably would have lost the same amount of money, give or take a little. ($1,000/mo rent * 5 years = $60,000). Again, this doesn’t take into account other factors such as the time value of money as the down payment could have been invested, home repairs, or other expenses. Either way, we would have spent a lot of money on housing.
We could have lost more money. The real estate market in our area of the US was hit pretty hard. We just left the Dayton, OH area, which lost tens of thousands of jobs, and for a period of time, it was in the top 10 for foreclosures. As you can imagine, that created an excess of inventory and decimated housing prices. Thankfully, our neighborhood was relatively insulated from the price drops compared to some of the other neighborhoods.
Some people can’t afford to sell, even if they want to. The real estate markets in some locations are so bad that the majority of people are upside down on their homes and selling would mean having to fork over tens of thousands of dollars they don’t have. Many people are so far under in their mortgages that they decided the best course of action was to walk away from their mortgage.
We can make it up on the back end. We want to buy another home, and the saving grace for us is that real estate prices are lower in most places, hopefully making this a good buying opportunity for us. Our hope is that we can get more house for our money when we buy our next home. Our goal is to stay in our next home for the next 5-10 years, so hopefully things will turn out better the next time around.
All of these things may sound like rationalizations, and to some degree they are. But it also serves as a reminder to myself and others that real estate isn’t a guaranteed investment.
Have you bought or sold a house recently? How did it work out for you?
Of all the interesting new tech that seems poised to garner a lot of buzz in 2011, near field communication (NFC), is probably the most exciting. If it takes off, it will transform the ways we communicate, share, and make payments with digital devices. This will likely take years to happen, but the groundwork is being laid right now. And RFinity is one of those companies at the forefront.
While Google and Apple are responsible for generating much of the buzz about NFC at the moment, the technology goes far beyond simply having the right type of chip in your mobile device. For example, how do you handle different types of data transfers being made from one device to another? And how to you ensure that they happen as quickly as possible? And most importantly, how do you ensure that they happen securely? Those are the things that RFinity is thinking about.
The company has just raised $4 million from Horizons Ventures in Hong Kong. And the space has gotten so red hot, in fact, that we hear they’re already out raising another round.
And it’s an easy bet for investors to make not only because of the space, but because of where the project originated: The U.S. Department of Energy. Specifically, RFinity was born when a bunch of infrastructure security experts working for the government were assigned to find all the vulnerabilities in cell phones. Through software they came up with, they were able to quite easily eavesdrop, manipulate SMS messages, and even compromise LAN security. Then they set out to figure out a way to stop people from doing those very things. That work led directly to RFinity.
Work originally began in the person-to-person and person-to-vendor sales space by way of mobile applications that route transactions through RFinity’s own secure servers. But now that NFC appears ready, RFinity is making sure they’re ready for it. The idea is that their technology could cut out the middle man here: themselves.
Obviously, the company isn’t going to share all the details on how they secure NFC transfers. But the basic overview is that they verify an incoming NFC signal and ask for a user’s permission before taking any action. Further, if the action is a transaction, it requires a PIN, just as you might do an ATM withdrawal. That’s all pretty standard. But the key is one-time-use transaction codes that RFinity creates on the fly along with complex cryptographic signatures. These ensure that an transaction is secure since it means that every transaction can only happen once. Even if those numbers were intercepted by a hacker, they would be useless beyond the one-time payment.
And even if your phone is lost or stolen, a thief couldn’t do anything without your PIN. And you can remotely shut down your NFC capabilities via RFinity. It’s enough to make me wish I could throw out all my credit cards right now. “Today’s identification and transaction systems are based on what? A magnetic strip on the back of a card, based on a 1950’s technology that relies on a base station to read the information embedded as a series of simple magnetic markers in plastic tape,” writes Josh Jones-Dilworth, who is working with the company to bring them to market.
Again, NFC as a technology is great and potentially game-changing. But the software is still needed to make it actually work. And some of the big guys began realizing that early on as companies like PayPal, Bank of America, and even Subway have been testing out different things with RFinity for some time. In fact, RFinity has actually been doing field tests of the software end of their technology since 2009 in places like Idaho, well before most people in the U.S. had ever thought about NFC.
But now people are starting to care. And soon, they could be caring a lot more. NFC is already built-in to Google’s new Nexus S device — and the company has put out a call for developers to start using the tech. Rumors have the next iteration of the iPhone gaining the technology as well. In other words, I suspect we may be seeing acquisition rumors starting to fly around RFinity in about six months or so. Provided their technology proves up to the NFC challenge, of course.
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