Anxious home builders pile on incentives
With the housing market looking increasingly frail, home builders and real-estate agents are going to new extremes to attract buyers, dangling lavish incentives and slashing prices.
In Boca Raton, Fla., Gordon Homes is offering to pay two years of property taxes and insurance – worth as much as $150,000 on houses priced as high as $2.5 million – for buyers of completed homes at its upscale Azura development. In Richmond, Va., Orleans Homebuilders Inc. is offering “Sizzling Summer Sale Savings” that include as much as $100,000 off the cost of upgrades ranging from granite countertops to a conservatory. And in Medford, Ore., Diane Adams, a real-estate agent, is offering to pay four months of mortgage payments on the $975,000 house she and her home-builder husband constructed on 20 acres near Crater Lake.
“I’d also negotiate a lower price, too,” says Ms. Adams, an agent with Re/Max International Inc. “I just want this house off our books.”