Answers by Jon Smith REALTOR

Renee, sorry about your parents. Before the speed vs price question, four things specific to inherited rural property that change the math: 1. The cash offer you are picturing may not exist. Offerpad and the other instant buyers only run in select metro markets and they buy standard suburban houses. A home on acreage in rural Arkansas that needs work is outside their box. What you will actually get is a local investor or a wholesaler, and a wholesaler is not a buyer. They tie it up with small earnest money and a long inspection window, shop your contract to their list, then come back to renegotiate or walk. If you go that route: proof of funds, a large non-refundable deposit, a short inspection period, and strike "and/or assigns" from the contract. 2. Confirm you can actually sell it. Is the estate through probate and is the deed in your name? Unsigned deeds and other heirs kill more of these sales than price ever does. Worth one call to an Arkansas probate attorney this week. 3. Call your insurance agent today. Most homeowners policies stop covering a house that has been vacant 30 to 60 days. That place may be sitting uninsured right now. A vacant dwelling policy is cheap next to the exposure. 4. Ask a CPA about stepped-up basis. Your basis resets to the value at date of death, so selling near today's value usually means little or no capital gains tax. Get a date-of-death valuation while those comps are still easy to pull. On the actual decision, never compare an offer price to a list price. Get a net sheet both ways: list price minus commission, minus the repairs the market will demand, minus taxes, insurance, utilities and mowing for however many months it takes to sell, minus the drives. Rural acreage sits longer and the financing is thinner, since a house needing work often will not pass FHA, VA or USDA. That is the honest argument for a cash sale. Sometimes the retail buyer pool really is small. The middle path most people skip: interview a land and farm agent in that specific county, not a general residential agent from the nearest city. Ask what they have closed on acreage in the last twelve months and how they price the land separately from the house, because the tract and the improvements are sometimes worth more to two different buyers than to one. Then give the market 30 to 45 days at a real price, with the investor offer in your back pocket as your floor. If nothing comes, take the cash knowing exactly what you traded for the speed. One more thing: do not write off the family friend. Backing out usually means nobody ever gave them a number and a deadline. I am licensed in Tennessee, so I would not be the one listing this for you. Happy to walk the numbers with you and connect you with a land agent in that county through my referral network at no cost to you. Send me the county and rough acreage if you want a name.

Doretha, the payoff is going to be the bigger number. Your principal balance is just the loan itself. The payoff adds interest that keeps running until your lender actually gets the money, plus a release fee and usually a wire fee. Couple of things worth knowing since most of the folks answering you here are licensed out of state. In Tennessee we use a deed of trust instead of a mortgage, and it is normally a title company running your closing rather than an attorney. They order the written payoff straight from your servicer and they order it good through your closing date. Whatever number your bank's app shows you is going to be short, so don't plan around it. The other one catches almost every seller here. Tennessee property taxes get paid in arrears, so at closing you credit the buyer for the part of the year you owned the house. That comes out of your proceeds right alongside the payoff and the commission, and people rarely see it coming. Also, your escrow balance is yours. It usually comes back as a separate check a few weeks after closing, so make sure your servicer has your forwarding address. Before you list, ask an agent for a seller net sheet. It's free and it shows what you actually walk away with, which I suspect is the number you're really after. I'm in Middle Tennessee so Cordova isn't my backyard, but I'm glad to help you think through the numbers or point you toward a good Memphis agent if you need one.

Mary, short answer is no. Most three season rooms don't count. One thing I'd push back on a little though. The standard doesn't say the heat has to come off your main unit. What it says is the space has to be finished like the rest of the house and usable year round. So a properly insulated room with good windows and its own mini split can get counted, and a room sitting on the main HVAC can get thrown out because the walls aren't insulated and there's indoor outdoor carpet on the floor. If yours is a real room and not a converted screen porch, it's worth having an appraiser look at it before you assume either way. The part nobody has mentioned yet is local. Go check what the Davidson County assessor already shows for your square footage. A lot of listings get populated straight off tax records, and if that room got picked up at some point, your listing can go live with a number you can't support. That's how this turns into a renegotiation at appraisal, or something worse after closing. Either way don't hide the room. Get it in the photos, put the dimensions in the listing, and let it sell as bonus space. Buyers in Nashville pay for a good one. They just don't pay for it by the foot. Jon Smith - Tullahoma Realtor