Buying A House: C or D?

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.

Congrats frogbs.

To those out there who are in the middle of the approval process, seeing your 30 day closing stretch to 45-60 days is more and more common, the banks are being nitpicky in the extreme. Our FHA loan took 2+ months to close, during which time we signed about 4 contingency extensions and had to straighten out a case of mistaken identity and clear ourselves of being responsible for $50K in loans made to someone whose SSN was one digit off from ours.

In short, the nauseous stress you feel will disappear upon moving in, or shortly thereafter.

God, that stress was unbelievable though.

around here you get nothing for less than $250.

Yeah stuff in the DC area is typically super expensive, so 135 doesn't seem bad

BTW my place is a condo, so you are paying more than that since you have to pay ~ $1300 in condo fees every year; the upside is you save on insurance (and don't have to mow or shovel snow)

Where are you located bingo??

nothing habitable short of $400k in my town, someone put a bullet in my brain

friend of mine just bought a place for $450!

central mass

yeah that'll do it...I hung out with my little brother who lives in Virginia and it's largely the same there (nothing good for less than half a mil). the upshot is that you generally make much more money. my brother makes about $15k more than I do even though he's two years younger...but he does pay $2k rent. everyone has nice cars there but the attitude seems to be super professional and self-absorbed.

we bought our place for $230 5 years ago. now its worth $200, i fucking hate it.

Bought ours for $250 four and a half years ago, have put about $30k into fixing it up, now we'll be lucky to get $215 for it. Really fucking hate this economy.

three cheers for buying 10 years ago, is all I can say

We bought 2400 sq ft plus 300 sq ft detached office/shop for $87K (9 years ago), but it's in the middle of nowheresville, so it's no brag.

of course we haven't put a dime into it...minus all my fab landscaping.

I haven't even had my offer accepted yet and I'm already going insane with nerves. It's a bank-owned property but the bank is Ocwen which as far as I can tell used to be the most shady thing in the world, and outsources all it's 'realtors' to bangalore, so you can't actually get ahold of anyone who seems to know what they are doing. If we buy this I hope the title turns out to be clean.

Did you go for Berkeley or dear old Oakland akm?

akm, did you look at el cerrito? i have no idea about property prices round here, but we live at the del norte bart end, on the hillside, super pleasant area, our place is 2br duplex, garage, laundry, over 1000sq ft, excellent condition and private (small) backyard - for just under $1200p/mth

yeah I know. no, berkeley. it's a school thing. I know schools (elementary) in el cerrito are ok but we aren't ready to compromise on that yet. we'd rather just rent for another year until something happens and we can buy something in town (I've lived here for 20 years already)

we were thinking about homeowning last year after we came into a large sum of $$ but my FIL talked us out of it. kinda relieved in a lot of ways: i love the ~idea~ of owning my own place and not having a landlord to answer to but buying a house here seems like a mountain of shit to climb and conquer. we ended up just sinking the money into investments, so hopefully that pays.

the way i look at it, rent vs owning, is that if you get a cheap house and the sellers' market starts doing really well, it doesn't matter how much your house is worth, bc you're still also a buyer, so you're gonna pay the same exorbitant price for the next place, even if you're selling your current place at a huge profit. unless you're willing to massively downgrade.

yeah that is true. I am planning (in my mind) to stay, for quite a while, and then move to argentina where my wife's extended family is, or something, honestly.

we just bought a house in Seattle. dealing with the mortgage broker was a struggle. they are incredibly paranoid about everything. i feel like they've placed the burden on the consumer when it was really the financial institutions that were mostly responsible. anyway, we found a great house at a good price in a great neighborhood. not a full on 'fixer' but definitely on the low end for this area. our agent was really great and other than the mortgage broker, it was a pretty fun experience. we've been in the house two weeks now and i finally found my razor. i still don't have my records unpacked and stereo hooked up but my clothes are in drawers and i can make coffee in the morning. yay!

Oh shit I made an offer on a house

― akm, Sunday, April 3, 2011 3:21 PM (4 months ago)

well that only took 4 fucking months. finally closed. What a giant nightmare this has been.

i'm just this minute dealing with paperwork that will probably eventually end with ours going into repossession.

but good luck!

congrats akm. where in berkeley did you end up?

south berkeley, right by near san pablo park. nice area (now, apparently used to be nothing but drug dealers). nice neighbors, decent price on a 3 bedroom with a tiny yard. needs a bunch of substructural work that I luckily got most of the money to cover. this was an REO, which we thought would have gone quickly. But, it was an asset that was jointly owned by several banks. Ocwen was also involved though they weren't the name of the bank that held the deed. Ocwen (based in florida, FTC investigations up the wazoo) has all of their actual employees that aren't sockpuppets in Bangalore. All paperwork routed through india, all communication came via emails from India, often in barely-coherent english. A counteroffer we sent out caused a 1.5 month delay of confusion. Ocwen also controls the title company that held title to the house; title company was in California, but never answered their phone; sent incorrect documents for notarization; basically entire process was about as awful a clusterfuck as I can imagine. On the plus side, I have stayed on top of all other homes for sale in town and we would not have gotten a better deal.

I am never owning a home

unless I move to a better country

http://thumbs.trulia.com/pictures/thumbs_3/ps.29/d/6/c/1/picture-uh=59a38deb64392015c3ff28261dead68-ps=d6c13f16116bd402d80fc82174ca763.jpg

that is gorgeous. it would cost 1.5 million here. we really should move one day.

i'm just this minute dealing with paperwork that will probably eventually end with ours going into repossession.

WAH? :-(

I still wonder if I should buy one to rent out. My pension is gonna be crazy low so I need something else. :-(

Buying a house/flat is kinda fun...It gets better when you get to the buying furniture, decorating, planting a garden phase!!

but it gets worse when your garage door breaks and you try to Tim Taylor the thing only to destroy your hand on a gigantic spring

Yeah, the first few months are great until you sign the paperwork to start construction on a new garage, but then the air conditioning dies when its 98 degrees outside and your furnace is 39 years old and you end up replacing those too. Then a month later you learn that the plumber that installed your water heater two years before you even bought the house used incompatible piping material without proper seals and now the reaction between the two metals has eaten a quarter sized hole out of the top of your water heater and is leaking all over the utility room. Then, literally the next day, the rubber hose is your kitchen faucet breaks and shoots water all over your kitchen.

my current worry is that my savings will soon be redenominated in Euros Nacionales (as opposed to the Convertible Euros they will have in Germany) and will hence be completely worthless. This makes me think that running out and buynig anything houselike with them might be a good idea.

Yeah, that all suck, sorry dudes :(

Just hoping the boiler lasts another winter...

I would think housing prices in America at least should continue to drop over the next year or two. Still hearing tons of stories about people who bought their houses for $375k and wound up selling them for less than 150. I'm not really sure if it'll ever rebound (which is good news if you're in your early 20's)

Yeah, we are currently trying to sell our house so we can take advantage of the lower prices to upgrade in size now that we have a baby on the way. We, stupidly in retrospect, bought our house in November of 2007 right before the world went to shit. We put about $75,000 worth of work into the house so far and, as of right now, are asking 73% of what we originally paid for it.

Buying the house was one of the worst decisions we've ever made, we regret it daily.

I still wonder if I should buy one to rent out. My pension is gonna be crazy low so I need something else. :-(

yeah but with stocks and shares really cheap now (and getting cheaper), your pension fund can buy up loads of them, so that by the time you have retired they will have appreciated so much in value that you will be rich rich rich!

That's what I am hoping.

the main thing is, we're all happy

Just got qualified today. So it begins..

gotta get rid of some of my records before we move. take them to the store. oy...

Fucking hell. The house we've had our eye on for the last five months closed today, and for a price about $40,000 lower than what we were all set to offer just before our potential buyer pulled out.

I cannot stress enough how goddamn fucking painful it is to try to sell a house. Not a week goes by where I don't either feel like screaming or crying. I'm ready to just give up and accept that fact that we will never ever be able to move out of our house.

I mean, seriously, unless you are planning to never, ever for any reason have to sell your house, do yourself and don't buy one in the first place. Trying to sell a house is a special kind of hell that will literally destroy your house and make you miserable for a large portion of your waking hours.

"literally destroy your life" I meant

See? I'm so angry I can't even type properly.