My neighbours turned down a million bucks

[Dave Fairb]

I got my neighbours together for a land assembly 3 years ago.

We had a solid written offer from a local developer for 2.25 million + we could live in our houses rent free until they were demolished, likely 2 to 3 years. 

13 houses on my block, majority of them assessed at around 1.2 to 1.3 million. 

I held the meeting in my house with the realtor present. 

Only 4 of my neighbours made any sense. The rest of my neighbours ranged from not getting it to just ridiculous.

One neighbour wanted 3 million and said her kids like to swim at the community centre nearby, so she didn't want to move. Her house is an older bungalow and for 2.25 million she could have bought a new house around the corner and had at least 250k in the bank. Or bought a similar older bungalow a block away and had around 800k + in the bank. 

Another neighbour said his house was already worth 3 million, and even when showed great comparables he still claimed it was worth 3 million. 

My other neighbour who's getting older and lays tiles for a living, on his knees all day long. He could hardly be bothered to talk about it. 

My other neighbour said " don't be so anxious, we are on an arterial route, developers will be knocking on our doors begging us to sell" 

How wrong he was, as it's now 3 years later and the bottom has fallen out of the land assembly market. The developer walked, and we would not get that offer again or anything close to it, in fact we wouldn't even get a developer interested in a land assembly period. 

Maybe I'm missing something, but to me it was unbelievable how they kind of ummed and aahhd at a million dollars! And these are people like me who work as janitors and carpenters and out in the rain earning a living...... a million ***** dollars! 

In the meeting I held, the realtor got all angry and started to walk out mid meeting when he heard the ridiculousness of their objections. He said he'd never seen such push back from a group of people being offered such a profitable deal.