Get a New Job, Get an (Unplanned) Second Home

Kind of like an unplanned pregnancy, more folks these days are ending up with  two or more homes on their real estate hands, making a lot more of us second (or multiple!) home owners. Real estate market conditions have practically stranded homeowners in their homes, which is not the end of the world if you keep a job, pay the mortgage down, and enjoy it. But what if you are offered a job in another city and cannot take it because you cannot sell your home? Countless Dallas Realtors tell me of clients who want to move here, but cannot budge because their home won’t sell. Back in the boom days, companies would move employees and even buy up their homes — many turning a profit on the re-sale. But now, companies are no longer wanting to be within ten hundred feet of the real estate biz.

“Nationally, the economy has caused many to reconsider career mobility. An Atlas Corporate Relocation Survey found in 2009 that 56 percent of responding companies reported employees turning down a chance to move, mostly among large and mid-size firms.”

That’s all because of real estate. So what’s a job-seeker to do?

Let’s say you, like Dunwoody, Georgia resident Ziyen Ng, are offered a job promotion but cannot unload your condo. What do you do? Lease the sucker out. That’s right, thanks to a new website called CorporateHousingbyOwner.com, he will get someone to lease his house, a management company will watch over it, and Ng is free to pursue that other job.

Should Ng buy a home in the new community he’d relocating to, we hope he becomes a regular reader of SecondShelters.