Buying A House: C or D?

Being in Austin again, I decided to peruse the house listing and blehk. Every Sunday I would look up houses for sale, back when I lived here, and have seen the obnoxious rise in prices. It just makes me not want to live here. After living in the country, it feels really claustrophobic here. I know I would always feel that way and needed to get out of the city one or two weekends a month or take a long drive. It's fun being here again but don't know if I want to call it home for long.

We have new neighbors and I'm wondering about the etiquette of asking them whether they're buying or renting the house.

You can probably find out without asking them by checking the county tax assessor records for that property ... here in GA that info is online even for rural counties. Usually those records show a sales history.

This is about to get real for me. I'm going to take a homebuyer education course Saturday morning that's a requirement for all of the downpayment assistance programs in the region. Then? I get pre-approved and start shopping.

Kinda scary, but also exciting.

F buying a house!

where are you looking?

I kind of wish we would have had such a course, though wonder what we would have ended up with had we taken one.

xp I'm looking inside Atlanta. I've already had my fill of the 'burbs in just two months. The thing I'm running into is that most decent condos I come across end up being outside my budget because of HOA fees. On the other hand, single family homes I can afford are in "transitional" parts of the city...it all just depends on the individual street, really.

From what I understand, the course just gives you the basics...keeping a budget, etc...then you get talks from a realtor and a loan officer who go into a little more depth about those steps...then you get individual counseling. This could be good for me because the process seems a bit overwhelming, even though I already know what I can afford, am reasonably certain I can get a loan with no problem, and kind of know already what I'm looking to buy.

Getting a loan is harder than you might think, or at least it was for me. Even if you have a good chunk set aside for your down payment they'll still want to see that you have some collateral after the fact, especially since you likely have no equity.

I hope I don't run into that. I figure if you're already utilizing a downpayment assistance program they realize you don't have a lot of other assets to bring to the table. Of course, if you agree to take the dpa funds, you have to use one of the program's participating lenders.

I guess I'll find out more tomorrow, but from the outside it looks like they're trying to make the process as painless as possible.

They will ask you for your 401k information with an eye toward tapping that-- they want to know how much capital you can raise. They want to know everything.

lol I don't even have one (I know I should). Basically all I've got is a car and enough furniture to fill a 1br apartment. Too bad I didn't buy 6-8 years ago, when all I'd have had to do was tell a lender how much I wanted to borrow and wait five minutes for them to cut the check.

we had a weird thing happen where we submitted a particular form that was to show whether we had outstanding debts to any federal agencies (student loans notwithstanding). Anyway we got the report back that we had a $55K debt to the small business administration. When we finally sorted it out (during Christmas and a furlough with our realtor breathing down our neck) it turned out the SBA had the actual debtor's social security number transposed with my wife's by one digit.

Oh jeez.

Currently own a house, suddenly have been presented with a possible new, bigger, nicer house of exactly the sort we've been thinking about. On paper, if we can sell our current house, this should be seamless but selling a house stresses me out more than buying.

The seamlessness aspect seems like the key difficulty

The course was actually pretty informative and I'm glad I went. Next stop, lender for pre-approval. Now I just have to remember where I put my old tax returns and W-2 forms when I moved last time.

Anyone in the UK got experience objecting to planning applications?
Just found out our next door neighbours are planning on building two houses on their land that will overlook the bottom of our garden and into the ground floor of our house. Pretty upset as we chose this place specifically to raise a family and have a quiet garden. Not to mention any building work will completely screw up looking after a newborn at home all day every day.

It's a kick in the teeth as we are in the process of selling some land to another neighbour on a different street and have spent a lot of time ensuring they can't build on it any higher that what's already there.

Pre-approval level: unlocked!

I didn't get pre-approved for as much as I was hoping (though it's still for more than I'd ideally like to spend). It's just that the lower number hurt my feelings. ha

Now I need to team up with an agent. Psyched, y'all!

good luck!

Going out with an agent (finally!) on Thursday to look at a few. I've already seen ones I like go under contract and it feels like losing a game. If the one I'm most interested in at this point goes under contract with someone else today or tomorrow, I'll flip the board and run out of the room.

Saw four on Thursday, crossed three of them off immediately. The fourth one is this cool but kind of quirky little cottage that was totally updated inside just this past February.

http://i.imgur.com/jYKWNh3.jpg

I'm like 95% certain I could very happily live in this house for at least five years, but how do you know when it's the one? The available inventory in Atlanta in my pricepoint is really small right now as opposed to two years or even a year ago, especially for homes that need little or no updating. I'd just hate to go under contract with one and then something I'm 100% certain about pop onto the market a week later. No wonder there are entire cable tv networks dedicated to this shit.

Sorry for all the handholding posts I'm making. I'm just really psyched and anxious and a little freaked out by doing the most adult thing I've ever done. It takes an ilx village to raise me.

There's never THE one house, there's just what feels good for now and then you move in and slowly realize what you wish was different and try to make that happen next time around.

We've lived in our current place for seven years now and are in the despite not planning on buying another right now we found one that fits our wants and needs better and therefore are suddenly in the process of buying it. For some reason the bank is letting us the second house without selling the current one, despite the fact that on paper I have no income right now and won't until I start a new job in August. We found a renter for our current one as houses here sell much better in the spring but they don't care about that either which makes it feel even crazier cause it's not like we're loaded or anything.

That is SUPER CUTE, jf

yeah that's a crazy style of house I don't think I've ever seen before but it looks rad

Awwww it's a faux-Tudor with strange trim, and it's adorbsable!

Ours have both been 'we just knew' but it's pretty rare (and we were super picky about what we wanted). Both times we put in half-hearted offers elsewhere first. BUT I know this is fairly rare and most people just know when it feels ok! We certainly learned a lot from our first place so it's not like that feeling actually tells you useful practical facts...

After you picked it, just stop looking and ignore everything else. It will always be the one then.

Lol we've been in ours 18 months and my husband still looks at new listings every day. hems just nosy though. Nothing has even suggested we'd be happier elsewhere... But it is a dumb thing to do!

Americans have a strange perception of 'Tudor'. But that looks cool.

And aye, there is no "this is the one" type lightning bolt; just an "I can live here" realisation.

just an "I can live here" realisation

I definitely feel that way.

There are a huge number of Tudor Revival starter homes around the U.S. The sharply pitched roof is the giveaway, usually echoed by another steep roofline behind and to one side and a faux-"rough hewn" aesthetic, often with mismatched stones and bricks. Jf's house looks weird because it's a local variation and the trim has been painted white, which is thoroughly wrong for the style. But it's cute! The river rock chimney with the two full-sized windows must make a nice view from inside.

http://www.rigov.org/images/pages/N584/14th_ST_3918.jpg

http://www.robsmith.biz/wp-content/plugins/rss-poster/cache/cac1f_Chicago-IL-4245d8-e1395104396382.jpg

Actually what's notable about that 2nd pic I posted is that you have basically the three American twentieth-century suburban home styles in a row: One probaby 1940s with those long blonde bricks and geometric windows, the Tudor Revivan, and on the other side, a brick Craftsman bungalow, by the looks of it. I just love American vernacular architecture.

Yeah, I'm not sure yet what I'd do with the trim on that house, but I don't want to leave it white.

The one in io's second photo with that bay window is sweeeeeet.

Also, I'd want to revert the screened in porch to an open-air porch, but it would take some doing (in addition to being screwed into the brick arches, they're secured in place with foam adhesive).

It should be dark brown, basically. You could maybe look into a more adventurous color scheme with a dark red/burgundy or something, but the trim and gutters should be darker than the brick, ideally.

Is that a screened porch on the front? That seems like a nice feature!

xp oh lol

The screened porch would be a lot less obtrusive if it weren't white and didn't have that stock hardware store diagonal lattice on the bottom. Did the prev owners have pets or small children? The lattice was probably to keep short, energetic things from barreling through the screens.

The lattice itself is just screwed into the wood frame. Could probably remove all of it in less than half an hour. Making the frame not white would make me like it more for sure.

I think we have given up on buying a house. We've looked at probably close to 50 properties over the last few months, so I guess we are pretty picky. We lost out on one and couldn't come to terms post-inspection on another, but mostly we haven't seen anything we liked enough to buy. Honestly kind of relieved and excited to keep renting for the time being, tbh.

I do have a fallback rental option if I decide it's not the right time to buy. I just have to get out of where I'm renting at present before I am driven insane.

(IO, the word "Tudor" is used differently over here: obv "Tudor" can mean actual Tudor stuff, but in residential property terms the phrase "mock-Tudor" is a common term usually meaning fake half-timbered buildings mostly from the late C19th to the mid C20th. Just slightly different useage, nothing weird to see here.) (Also: hi IO, it's been ages.)

JF I forgot to say that 95% certain is pretty certain plus it looks cool!
admrl we looked at around 50 last time round but tbh we looked at a wide range despite knowing at heart we wouldn't want a lot of them. Optimistic thinking..

xp Well obviously, you have ACTUAL Tudor things! Our version is I think properly called "Tudor Revival" maybe?

JF I forgot to say that 95% certain is pretty certain plus it looks cool!

My dad went back to scope the exterior in more detail before he left town, and he said it has some issues we need to talk about tonight. Since it's already listed at nearly the top of my budget, I won't have a lot of money to fix anything that needs fixing anytime soon. Depending on what he tells me, I may have to cross it off the list. Wah.

might just be ghosts...

btw, I also looked at this one that I mentioned upthread. It was a shithole. Not unsalvageable, but worth way less than what is being asked for it.

Typical British Mock Tudor:

http://www.modernoak.co.uk/resources/_wsb_380x271_Mock+Tudor+Planking+web.jpg

We looked at something like 350 houses over 18 months!