Q: I had my house on the market for a while but decided to wait a year so that I could get my price.

We already moved so the house is empty. Friends are telling us we should rent it out but I don’t want it trashed. What do you think?

A: There are a couple of issues here. The first is the issue of renting out your house. Unless you don’t really worry about money at all, you’re throwing away a lot of it by having your house sit empty. There are mortgage payments, utilities, insurance and taxes to pay, plus the cost in time and/or money to keep up the yard. Renting would get you some money to cover those costs.

If you do a proper job of screening tenants you won’t have your place “trashed”. Trust one of the property management firms on the Island to find good, responsible tenants and that shouldn’t be a worry.

The other issue is holding on to your house to “get your price”. I’ve said many times before that the price is set by what a buyer is willing to pay. You can hold out all you like but if your expectations are too high, you’ll put a lot more money into the house with little hope of recovering it.

The real estate market here on Vashon is really not bad. Sales of homes actually went up 14% in the first quarter of 2009 over the first quarter of 2008. The average price of those homes did drop, but only by about 10%. That’s well below what most markets have experienced.

It almost seems that we have only two kinds of property on the market: homes that sell in a few days or weeks, and those that have been sitting for months or even years. It’s all about price. The well priced properties have been selling quickly, some even with multiple offers.

If you don’t want to price your house to sell now, then getting a renter in there to help offset your negative cash flow would be good.