Several charities have told The Chronicle that it’s taking them longer to receive money they were promised in donors’ wills because it is so hard to sell the real estate and other items donors left when they died.
Even when the properties do sell, the price is often substantially lower than it was before the real estate market started to plummet in 2007.
Fund raisers blame double-digit declines in bequest income at the American Heart Association (down 14 percent) and the Nature Conservancy (down 20 percent) on the crash of the real-estate market.
Harvard University is even harder hit: Most real-estate sales over the past two years have generated about 25 percent less than they would have before the economic downturn, according to Charles W. Collier, a senior philanthropic adviser at the university.
Has your organization faced a drop in bequest income because of the sluggish real-estate market?
One Response to Slow Real-Estate Market Depresses Bequests
dblakemore - May 18, 2010 at 2:15 pm
As a matter of fact, bequests to my organization are up this fiscal year, with them coming from all over the country — Hawaii, Massachusetts, Florida — and most of them requiring real estate to be liquidated prior to distribution. I am interested to hear how others are faring though.