Buying A House: C or D?

I live in southern california I will never own a house

tbh 90% of the homeowners I know (including myself) live in small boring towns for job reasons where having your own private affordable domain comes at the expense of art / theater / exciting new restaurants / diversity / museums / touring bands / and all other big city amenities.

congrats ShariVari. It's mental that buying a house is the biggest purchase of your like yet you probably spend longer looking at a new pair of jeans before buying.

Fort Worth has a million people so it isn't quite on the small boring town side (though it's not super exciting tbh) but it is 120F four months out of the year.

this house is still on the market over three months, worse houses have sold in the same price range, makes me wonder what horrors can't be seen from real estate photos.

Here's what that house looked like at this time last year. It was foreclosed on and rehabbed. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you would definitely want a very very good inspector to look it over thoroughly to make sure the rehabbers did a quality job as it obviously was not well maintained prior to the foreclosure. Looks fine cosmetically but a lot of serious issues could be hidden.

Layout seems a bit odd too, with that wall right up against the front door and the bedroom off the kitchen. Thinking it might've originally been a two bedroom.

http://scoot.net/gallery/bbs/livingston.jpg

I wouldn't even think of buying a home if I had any credit card debt.

xp to sparkle motion: i live on the border of oakland/emeryville, near the old emeryville high school, and a house one street over just sold for something like 750k. it was a cute house but still. every year that goes by, the idea of ever owning a house just gets more and more unlikely.

I drive through holby hills in beverly hills all the time on my way back from work and get to see 20m houses sold, bought, torn down, and replaced with something even more opulent. its rough.

ugh holmby

just1ne I lived in emeryville for like 6 weeks... 750k is crazy!

yah and rents are spiking too, as people are forced out of sf and into the east bay. we're sort of waiting for our landlords to put a huge increase on our rent :/

were you living in a duplex/house or one of those huge complexes? (another one of those has just gone up on the corner of stanford and powell)

we were being put up in a hotel, but a friend of mine was in one of the big complexes for 2 years. I don't recall her rent being too bad but that was around 2010 and comparing it to SF rent so

we looked at the one that backs right on to the free way - 2br, $2400, with something like a 10% increase each year.

grats sv

Thanks!

xref to student loans thread next month I start saving for a deposit be that for a place in Dublin (lol) or down home or just-to-have or for after the next crash (lol).

lol indeed

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y115/kitbrash/wdyll/smh_million_zpsfzseu6yy.jpg

congrats are in order for managing to buy in london, sv!

the question of whether to (begin saving money to) buy a house looms fairly large for me. i am saving a bit at the moment but i have to say if i ended up with even half the money for a deposit i find it hard to justify spunking it all on a house, as opposed to keeping it and the financial security and freedom it'd bring.

Thanks, though i can't claim to have bought in London. 35 minutes from Kings Cross and 40 from London Bridge on the train is pretty good going given that commuting from Zone 6 would probably take longer.

I've always been extremely reluctant to buy, as i think the market will probably crash at some point, but finding somewhere i'd be happy to live for a few years at least and that is totally affordable in comparison to London means it makes more sense now. Even at 6% i'd be paying less for a mortgage on a two-bed house than i would in rent on a one-bed flat in Romford or wherever. It could all go horribly wrong but the deposit isn't doing me much good in the bank.

yeah i guess it depends on your situation. because i am doing a kind of contract-based work along with separate doing performance and writing stuff, the money in the bank and the freedom to take a few months off if i needed to is quite attractive for me, maybe moreso than having the house.

what area are you in, if you don't mind my asking?

Sydney Morning Herald headline is bollocks btw. Sydney's median house price is not higher than London average house price. Higher than London median house price probably (I can only find 2014 figures for that and it was AU$722,709) but not average, that's AU$1.2m+.

I'll be moving to Rochester, if all goes well. It's much nicer than any of the surrounding areas (Gillingham, Chatham, Strood, etc).

https://www.redfin.com/IL/Chicago/1049-W-Wellington-Ave-60657/unit-3A/home/13364573

I'm in no position to buy, couldn't put enough down for this, but this is a pretty nice vintage just a few blocks from us. I would love to get into a newer construction, but a vintage that's been updated like this would be acceptable.

Higher than London median house price probably

99% probability they meant median, and that laying off 40% of workforce and literally offshoring subbing and layout 2 years back led to misuse of average

That one Jeff just linked looks a lot like a place I stayed at with friends years ago. They had an apartment that was just the entire lowest (garden?) level, though.

Here you go. Just down the street from the race track to boot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI3HpnvAYq4

4 BED, 3 BATH 3,000+ SQ. FT.

$162,000

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/552-Prospect-Ave_Hot-Springs-National-Park_AR_71901_M75648-95106?row=14

what is the difference of median and average (i presume by average we mean.. mean?) in london/sydney? interested to know. I imaging mean being slightly higher, due to existence of some ultra expensive properties, but not by much.

(i mean difference as in the numerical difference, not their difference in definition)

wtf at the house pplains posted - is it haunted or something?

Foreclosed, but that still doesn't really answer the question.

looks old, maybe the foundation is garbage

look at the price on this house in town here. so beautiful. wish i could afford it. i'd move across town.

http://www.cohnandcompany.com/properties/1028

many good sitting rooms in that house. I need to move somewhere green and (sometimes) cold.

what is happening here that makes this $800k?

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2072-Cedar-Loop-Jackson-WY-83001/2101596825_zpid/

Jackson, Wyoming is a millionaire's playground sort of place, like Aspen, Colorado or Sun Valley, Idaho.

"How much can you afford" calculators are absolutely batshit insane, like 3.75X my yearly income w/ tiny down payments crazy once all my credit card debt is paid off. I can't believe there would be mortgage lenders dumb enough to let me do that.

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/3205-Willing-Ave_Fort-Worth_TX_76110_M80465-05199?row=1

Not usually a fan of stone but I dig this house if I ripped up the carpet and refinished the wood floors that must be underneath (which is when I discover that they're all destroyed).

If there are no wood floors under the carpet, you can get some vinyl/laminate and do them for reasonably cheap (flooring options are basically limitless now). Aside from the carpet, though, I see nothing at all wrong with this house. I think it's my favorite one you've posted here.

A lender will (pre)approve you for a crazy amount—one there's no way you could logically afford to take on—but they'll also help you out with what you can really afford and work in concert with your agent when it comes time to make an offer. Calculators, I found, are a decent guideline, but you don't really comprehend all the various things that go into an offer/a mortgage payment/homeowners insurance/property tax until you start signing a bunch of paperwork. Then it all makes sense and you feel way more relieved.

If you think it's bad now, you should have seen it seven years ago! xxp

I got preapproved for twice what I was even asking for, but the preapproval letter they provided me/my agent was only for the amount I had asked for. When I asked why it was no higher than that, she told me "oh, dear, you were actually approved for XXXXXX, but there's no reason to go broadcasting that all over the place when all the seller really needs to see is YYYYYY." lol

Waiting to hear from my brother if he wants to sell his old house - paid $75k at the height of the boom @ 7% (owner finance), owes $60k, needs one pier raised and stabilized and the AC is on its way out. It's a Craftsman-style bungalow, so if he'll sell it to me for what he owes I'd go for it and spend the next two years redoing it top to bottom - needs storm windows or new windows for efficiency, new siding, probably needs some electrical work, I'd foam insulate below the subfloor and behind the new siding.

The biggest downside is only being one bathroom - if I redo the bathroom I'd have to shower outside or something for a couple of weeks.

If you could get it for what he owes, it sounds cool. The problem you'd run into is needing to take out a home improvement second mortgage when you don't really have any equity yet. You could look at an FHA 203(k) loan instead of just a traditional loan, but that would mean all the repairs you tell them you need to make have to be made within 12 months and they put you on a schedule and disperse money a little at a time when you're ready to initiate each project.

http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/housing/sfh/203k

Also, you have to carry mortgage insurance on an FHA loan forever now (it used to be only until you had a certain percentage of your principal paid down).

you can refi once you hit a certain point and still get away from PMI, though

major homeowner skills attained as I successfully completed an upgrade of my gas plumbing this past weekend. Let me tell you that was some scary shit.

did you do it yourself? I have put in gas lines, but only on other people's houses as part of a job. not to be taken lightly.

dish soap works great as a leak detector, just coat the junctions with it and watch for bubbles.

Yeah I did it myself. It's all to relocate supply lines so I can have a stackable washer/dryer. The previous owners had a maze of water & gas pipes protruding into the (very small) laundry room. Now that I've redone everything it's neatly hidden inside the walls. But what it meant was completely redoing the water (which was some very rusty galvanized, now copper) and adding new gas. After I ran the new gas lines, I did a sealed pressure test, then cut into the old, joined them together, and did a soap bubble test over the whole thing. No leaks, but I haven't slept especially well since I completed it.

If I could afford it even a little I would have hired a plumber, because it certainly was not fun.