Buying A House: C or D?

lol

Phil where are you located at?

I'm looking at buying a house in Wisconsin and you can get some pretty good looking homes around $120k (or less). Crazy that the mid 400's is "cheap" for the Bay Area but it makes me glad to live here!!

aim for something close to transit and you can always rent to a bunch of college kids if you have to leave for some reason.

i mean I'm looking at 2brs in berkeley for rent and who the fuck are these people who think they can get $3k a month for a 2br apartment? That is as much as a mortgage. I guess they are planning on rentint to like, three students or something. I had a fairly nice flat in a good area but we really had to move out of there after my wife had cancer and went through chemo in that flat, it just was starting to feel like a trap. we had seven months of renting a friend's house for cheap and now we've got to find something permanent...yuck.

also any recommendations for something other than craigslist to find rentals is appreciated. 1/2 of the listings on there are spam now or some kind of scam crap.

frogbs, I'm in Cleveland, or Cleveland Heights anyway.

Yeah I would imagine Cleveland is a cheap place to buy these days; still that's cheap if you're that close to a major city.

maybe I will try to buy some cheap foreclosed property and if it all falls apart move into some shit apartment temporarily, or go move my family to tilden park, eat wild animals and steal stuff from rich people's houses

I would have liked to end up in Berkeley but prices were $50-$100K more than Oakland for comparable properties. It depends on your space needs too--if you can do something less than 1000SF, you should be fine finding something in Berkeley

our friend's house (the one we're in now) must be like, 850 sq. it has a partially finished attic though which is nice. i thought it was a fucking hobbit hole when we moved in but now I'm used to it.

I'd live in oakland in heartbeat if we didn't have to send our son to school in september. bigger houses, more character, city is generally more interesting, etc.

Oakland homeowners have to pay a mosquito abatement assessment on their property taxes. I don't think i've ever encountered a mosquito in Oakland.

well it's working then

yeah, but are there even mosquitos to abate?

true I haven't seen any mosquitos in the bay area...but maybe there are some around the lake?

I'm sure this is just some way for crooked Oakland city government to line their pockets though

I'm sure this is just some way for crooked Oakland city government to line their pockets though

that was my assumption as well

like SF, but not as much so, Oakland has a lot of renters, so we pass a lot of kinda wtf property tax measures and special assessment taxes.

well here is the whole history

http://www.mosquitoes.org/history.htm

this is quickly becoming the most depressing and frustrating experience of my life

i'm sorry -- at least you didn't buy 3 1/2 years ago and aren't dealing with being underwater and having a mortgage company that won't respond to your phone calls/emails/letters

a couple of my friends just went through that, and it almost ruined their marriage.

We have an assumable fixed-rate mortgage -- might be useful if/when we sell.

When my wife gets back from the middle east, we're planning on buying as well. I'm kinda terrified by this whole process.

I'd live in oakland in heartbeat if we didn't have to send our son to school in september.

I heard people lived in Albany to avoid the Berkeley schools!

we're planning on buying as well. I'm kinda terrified by this whole process.

i thought it was fun. frustrating, but fun. there's a lot to learn. a good agent helps.

xp - people live in Berkeley or Piedmont to avoid the Oakland schools, and other people live in Albany to avoid the Berkeley schools.

people who live in albany to avoid berkeley schools are snobs

albany does have good schools, but it's at least 100k more for a comparable home there. that said there aren't any really 'bad' parts of albany to live in, and there are certainly bad parts of berkeley. i mean I'd live in them if I didn't have a wife and a son and didn't care about my safety and I was 21, but not now.

are the 'bad' parts of berkeley really much more dangerous than the parts of oakland you'd want to live in?

'bad' berkeley always just felt like oakland to me

yes, there are parts of berkeley that are "bad", with sacramento/ashby being kind of the nexus of that, stretching up and over several blocks in both directions. this is a worse neighborhood than a great deal of oakland. It's also where it appears I can afford to buy! hoorah!

love owning a house, best move i ever made

we are loving it, frustrations and all. The pain of the process melts away after you've made it in.

That first tax refund after you buy your house is one hell of a count your chickens incentive
As in, you have every reason to doubt people who tell you what a deal it is to be a homeowner - there's so much justification going on, especially in an overpriced market (which it still is in DC, apparently, since my property taxes are still going DOWN, not up) - but seriously, I can paint my walls however I want, we can hire our own handymen, the condo committee here is good, and for the first time in my life I have neighbors as friends and peers instead of feeling like there's some kind of weird transient situation or some caste issue. And then on top of that, the tax shit is for real. I always owed as a renter, now I'm seriously considering adjusting my W4 so I can have some of that interest to myself.

otoh mortgage bankers really are the worst. not as bad as a bitchy landlord, by far (bitchy landlord is just another person who has to play middleman between you and said mortgage banker, anyway) but they have no reason to be helpful after you've signed the papers - mortgage maintenance really is a loss leader for most banks nowadays and they display that pretty openly - the call center folks you have to talk to, as nice as they might want to be, have almost no power to fix anything (like correct your escrow payment to reflect their own employers' incompetence at paying property taxes on time, instead of indirectly saddling you for the late fees as their pigfucking overlords would prefer)

Oh shit I made an offer on a house

hey congratulations

well it hasn't been accepted yet and my loan hasn't been approved, but, fingers crossed

In the middle of buying and selling a house and so sick of the stress.

xp good luck! i keep hearing horror stories about unresponsive mortgage brokers and loan companies. Like you would think that now they have less business, they would pay more attention to the customers they do have, but, apparently not.

mortgage brokers can't get a god damn thing approved from their higher-ups at banks, that seems to be the real hold-up for lots of people right now

yeah, i'm pretty sure that's what's going on. I was telling a friend of mine this ... that brokers work on commission, so I'd think the problem is higher up the chain.

the mortgage brokers i know are just frustrated as fuck because you're exactly right, they can't make their money w/origination fees if houses aren't selling. banks are still scared

Closed on a house a few weeks ago, moved in last week. I was kind of apprehensive about the whole process, given how frustrating it is for a lot of people, but... it was really, really easy. My boyfriend and I kept asking each other, "When does this become stressful?" And it never did. I think it helped that we were looking in the middle of winter. There were a lot of houses available in our price range (under $150k in South Minneapolis) and zero competition from other buyers. Also, I'm a chronic saver, so the down payment wasn't an issue.

I had a great realtor, who was recommended by a friend, and he set me up with a small mortgage company that was quick and responsive. Looked at a dozen houses over the course of a few weekends, picked one, and put in a low-ball offer. The sellers--it was an estate sale, so the sellers were the previous owner's kids--met me halfway and that was it. It's an old house, so the wiring was dangerously outdated, but we got that taken care of before we moved in, and now we're just trying to get settled. Classic!

in fairness, moving out of rental/parents/whatever and buying a first place isn't generally stressful (unless you're unlucky or get messed about by sellers etc). But per jon just upthread:

In the middle of buying and selling a house and so sick of the stress

the key point here being having to sell a place at the same time as buying one = open to so many possible horrors it's not even vaguely fun.

It seems to me that it would be easier not to sell and buy at same time. I think i would prefer to sell then move into a rental and then buy from there

Buying our place (as first-time buyers) was a breeze. I think we were the only people I know to actually get decent solicitors that didn't hold up the process as well. Being in a chain does seem incredibly stressful though.

Yeah, at this point its just trying to find a buyer for ours. We've gotten the pre-approval, found three or four houses we like, but all the interest in our current house has fallen through so far.

my mortgage broker keeps telling me he can explain away any weirdness. but I am following up with a second option just in case.

I just had an offer accepted. Originally $115k but they dropped it to 99. We decided to offer the money they wanted, but we asked for nearly all their furniture (and their 50" TV) instead. Surprisingly, they accepted.

where the heck do you guys get a house for $115K?

Wisconsin, in kind of a rural area. It's in this tiny village but it's also a minute off the highway which is close to two decent sized towns. Real estate prices here are very reasonable; I mean they're not super low but they're not really inflated either...you generally pay what they're worth

wow.

I bought my house last year for $135 an hour outside of DC. It's certainly not a model home or anything, but there's lots of stuff like that around.