Affordability is very important, as Rym pointed out, but don't just go buying a house now if you're going to get sick of it and wind up moving into a bigger place in a few years. Then all you've done is live through the worst years of your mortgage and started it over.
I've seen a lot of people buy a starter house, and then all of a sudden it's not good enough once they get married.
Considering how undervalued many homes are AND the low interest rate on mortgages now is the time to buy. When the market recovers (and it will in a few years) what you bought today may be worth close to double then. More so when you research the home and see what it was valued pre-bubble crash.
The house I bought sold for almost three times what I paid for it back in 2005.
Going back and forth on negotiations for a very nice house. Hopeful I can close the deal, but not assuming anything. We are a hair under $10k away in our haggling, which is effectively peanuts range at this point, so the only way we lose this place is if someone else comes in and starts a bidding war.
It's a good situation though. The Realtor did an idiotic thing, which is enter the home into MLS with only 1 photo and sparse detail, with the intent to go in a few days later after staging the interior, taking the pictures, and holding a realtors-only open house. It's a very hot town so we told our realtor to get us in ASAP when we saw the listing. Lo and behold, the house is awesome, and we were the only people to see it last weekend.
All of the above activity took place yesterday, and the good news is the realtor did a shitty job photographing the house. A lot of what we liked about the place is not captured in those photos, and the few flaws are very prominent. Hopefully this buys us another day or two to haggle as others might not be rushing to get in to see it on a weekday. A
lso, we found out they are selling the place due to a divorce and financial troubles, and they still owe a ton on the renovations they did to the place a few years ago. It's nice to go after a place that somebody put a lot of work into and doesn't want to sell, but has to. Usually this would make them a desperate seller, but like I said it's a hot town and the market is warming. Still, gonna be a good deal if we can make it happen.
That is the reality of a certain type of suburb built in the early-to-mid 90's. The properties are very long and skinny, and I don't mind it. The land itself that close to NYC is worth too much to not cram as many houses in as possible. As you get past the 1-hour circle, the more recently built-up suburbs (past 50 years) give you much more breathing room, but hey, location.
The one nice thing about these towns is they all have really really nice "Main St" downtowns. You can walk to the train station or downtown strip in 5 min. You won't find that in the outer suburbs.
40x184 lot. Don't have the house footage but it's 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath, and is definitely larger than the front of the house would lead you to believe.
Upstairs: 3 bedrooms. First floor: 25% of the first floor is advertised as an "in-law suite" in that it has a bedroom, full bath, and teeny tiny office room shoved into one corner of the house, all connected, so it can be made private if needed. The rest is a nice big open living/dining/kitchen space. Basement: half-finished. Since the house is up high, it's a short staircase but also low ceilings. The stairway is wide and open so it flows from the living room into the finished half of the basement. Other half is unfinished washroom, utility, and storage. Yard: nice and big, with a greenhouse in the back.
Here's the house on Trulia. Like I said, the pics are bizarre. They don't show 3 out of 4 bedrooms, the large living room in the front of the house, or the basement! They do, however, show the weird-ass half-carpeted kitchen with a couch in it. That kitchen is screaming to have an island put in, and better use made of the attached family room/dining space. 5 of the pics are of the outside, and show basically the same thing. This leads me to believe the listing agent is an idiot.
Some other factors that make the place appealing are very reasonable taxes for the area, and that all of the HVAC was redone in 2007. There are expensive old homes in town where you still have to deal with fucking radiators and window air conditioning!
The house is listed at $449k. If all goes according to plan, we'll end in the upper 420s.
Those pics! If you get the house, send a bottle of champagne to the realtor ;-).
Here's a bathroom. Now here's the SAME bathroom, but slightly zoomed in and crooked! If I hadn't physically been in the house, I would desperately hope that one bathroom actually was a 100% perfect but slightly smaller and crooked replica of the other. Craaaazy house!
Neat house my only comments are the closeness of the train line behind your yard and the fact Zillow thinks housing values in that area are still going to fall about 0.3 but looking at houses around it for similar type it seems pretty good at the rate you want. Though Zillow does estimate it to be 360k though that might not take in account improvements. Hopefully it assesses with the bank with what it's worth so you don't have issues with Mortgage.
I don't know what it is with Zillow, but I always find their estimates to be overly conservative. Maybe they're just a bit off for my area?
We definitely had to look into the train line. It runs past the back of the house, but it turned out to be the Conrail line, not the commuter line, so it is infrequently used and is low-speed freight. Still, we are looking at this as the "rest of our life" house and usage of rail lines are always subject to change. Conrail could get some new client tomorrow and put that section of track on full duty. One thing we also considered is how long people on the street have been living there. Is the train driving turnover? Didn't turn out to be the case, so I think we're safe.
Only other hesitation was no garage, but in all honesty, I'm as far away from being a "car guy" as you can get, and am not a big lawn care guy either. There is a shed half to the greenhouse, and that should fit all I need.
I lived in a townhouse for many years so the luxury of a garage was laughable. Now I have gone almost 2 years in a house with a 1-car garage and it has done a great job holding a lawnmower and letting me procrastinate breaking down cardboard boxes for 2 months at a time on recycling day. It looks like a shrine to Amazon.com.
I'm in the process of getting my house ready to sell. I've had it since November 2008, and once it sells, I'll be moving back into the house I grew up in.
MyCroft000, jesus, those houses are cheap, my only concern there is some of the houses near you sold for under 40k in the last few years, but Zillow seems to think prices will raise about 10% this year. The good part is it doesn't look like a lot of houses are for sale in that area as well. You should be good (just take good pictures :-p)
Buying a house in 2008 and getting a profit?!? You are doing GREAT! Did you get that $8k first time homebuyer credit? I bought a house in January, then the program started in April. Talk about missing the boat.
My 2008-era mistake is unsellable at current prices, but has turned into a nice little rental property. As long as I don't get burned by tenants it should redeem itself one day.
I would be concerned if too if many of those houses hadn't gone through some major improvements, in fact right now, my house is probably pulling values down on my street(the result of losing a Mon-Fri 10am-6pm job and moving to a job with an Audio Visual company where I couldn't predict whether or not I would even have a day off to recover from work let alone keep the yard and house in order). Plus Phoenix took a much harder home value hit than most places, but is also recovering better.
Also it doesn't look like houses are for sale because they aren't staying on the market longer than a week in our area. Two houses that I didn't even know were for sale just went for $135k and $138.5k within 3 blocks of my house.
And yes we got the $8k credit, it bought all our appliances, and all the paint and other items we needed to turn the house into a good living space.
We have a realtor who will be coming in on the 29th for a second meeting to start planning where her photographer will setup to take pictures from and help us get the most for the house, the best part is that she doesn't charge extra for that, it comes out of her commission.
I just have to find a way to keep our greyhound from digging holes in the back yard again and again.....that isn't going to happen.
I see the possibility of having slow moving extremely long freight trains go past your backyard only as a positive. Trains are a _very_ big thing with us right now (well have been for a couple of years already).
Oh well. House fell through. Although all logic pointed to getting a great deal (desperate seller), we wound up increasing our offer after a long hold-out b/c A) interest rates rising, we are dead set on this specific 4-mile-wide town, so limited supply, and C) sellers insisted they were sticking to this price to avoid short sale.
Turned out they were lying assholes and they're still filing for foreclosure, the sale price still won't put them in the black, so it'd be a short sale, and I'm not dealing with 6 months of bullshit, thousands of dollars in fees, all with no guarantee. Contract is null and void.
No. She had to come to my town yesterday to get something I dropped off at the PD for her. I think she drove by my place and saw my ex wife's car in the driveway. She then accosted her at her work... Yeah... Wonderful...
Comments
I've seen a lot of people buy a starter house, and then all of a sudden it's not good enough once they get married.
The house I bought sold for almost three times what I paid for it back in 2005.
It's a good situation though. The Realtor did an idiotic thing, which is enter the home into MLS with only 1 photo and sparse detail, with the intent to go in a few days later after staging the interior, taking the pictures, and holding a realtors-only open house. It's a very hot town so we told our realtor to get us in ASAP when we saw the listing. Lo and behold, the house is awesome, and we were the only people to see it last weekend.
All of the above activity took place yesterday, and the good news is the realtor did a shitty job photographing the house. A lot of what we liked about the place is not captured in those photos, and the few flaws are very prominent. Hopefully this buys us another day or two to haggle as others might not be rushing to get in to see it on a weekday. A
lso, we found out they are selling the place due to a divorce and financial troubles, and they still owe a ton on the renovations they did to the place a few years ago. It's nice to go after a place that somebody put a lot of work into and doesn't want to sell, but has to. Usually this would make them a desperate seller, but like I said it's a hot town and the market is warming. Still, gonna be a good deal if we can make it happen.
The one nice thing about these towns is they all have really really nice "Main St" downtowns. You can walk to the train station or downtown strip in 5 min. You won't find that in the outer suburbs. 40x184 lot. Don't have the house footage but it's 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath, and is definitely larger than the front of the house would lead you to believe.
Upstairs: 3 bedrooms. First floor: 25% of the first floor is advertised as an "in-law suite" in that it has a bedroom, full bath, and teeny tiny office room shoved into one corner of the house, all connected, so it can be made private if needed. The rest is a nice big open living/dining/kitchen space. Basement: half-finished. Since the house is up high, it's a short staircase but also low ceilings. The stairway is wide and open so it flows from the living room into the finished half of the basement. Other half is unfinished washroom, utility, and storage. Yard: nice and big, with a greenhouse in the back.
Here's the house on Trulia. Like I said, the pics are bizarre. They don't show 3 out of 4 bedrooms, the large living room in the front of the house, or the basement! They do, however, show the weird-ass half-carpeted kitchen with a couch in it. That kitchen is screaming to have an island put in, and better use made of the attached family room/dining space. 5 of the pics are of the outside, and show basically the same thing. This leads me to believe the listing agent is an idiot.
Some other factors that make the place appealing are very reasonable taxes for the area, and that all of the HVAC was redone in 2007. There are expensive old homes in town where you still have to deal with fucking radiators and window air conditioning!
The house is listed at $449k. If all goes according to plan, we'll end in the upper 420s.
We definitely had to look into the train line. It runs past the back of the house, but it turned out to be the Conrail line, not the commuter line, so it is infrequently used and is low-speed freight. Still, we are looking at this as the "rest of our life" house and usage of rail lines are always subject to change. Conrail could get some new client tomorrow and put that section of track on full duty. One thing we also considered is how long people on the street have been living there. Is the train driving turnover? Didn't turn out to be the case, so I think we're safe.
Only other hesitation was no garage, but in all honesty, I'm as far away from being a "car guy" as you can get, and am not a big lawn care guy either. There is a shed half to the greenhouse, and that should fit all I need.
Bought for $85k, hope to get $125-135k
http://www.trulia.com/homes/Arizona/Phoenix/sold/887587-4513-E-Burgess-Ln-Phoenix-AZ-85042
Not a bad investment for a short time to let me get my family into a house that I've yet to find the equal of:
http://www.trulia.com/homes/Arizona/Chandler/sold/20897298-997-N-Oregon-St-Chandler-AZ-85225
My 2008-era mistake is unsellable at current prices, but has turned into a nice little rental property. As long as I don't get burned by tenants it should redeem itself one day.
Also it doesn't look like houses are for sale because they aren't staying on the market longer than a week in our area. Two houses that I didn't even know were for sale just went for $135k and $138.5k within 3 blocks of my house.
And yes we got the $8k credit, it bought all our appliances, and all the paint and other items we needed to turn the house into a good living space.
We have a realtor who will be coming in on the 29th for a second meeting to start planning where her photographer will setup to take pictures from and help us get the most for the house, the best part is that she doesn't charge extra for that, it comes out of her commission.
I just have to find a way to keep our greyhound from digging holes in the back yard again and again.....that isn't going to happen.
Turned out they were lying assholes and they're still filing for foreclosure, the sale price still won't put them in the black, so it'd be a short sale, and I'm not dealing with 6 months of bullshit, thousands of dollars in fees, all with no guarantee. Contract is null and void.
On to the next one!
I don't want to sell the place so will likely rent it out for a few years while I live somewhere else.