Buying A House: C or D?

anyway that kinda sucks I'm sorry marcos! fire everyone involved.

What do you all think about the presence of lead in old houses?

My wife and I are only really interested in pre-WWII designs, but I was surprised to learn recently that nobody seems to think abatement actually works very well, and it should just be considered a given that if you buy an old house you'll have some degree of exposure.

Our current rental is an old house, and has lots of lead, and while the landlord is going to abate, I guess knowing what I know now, I'm not expecting much to come of it.

I don't have kid yet, thank god, but my dog is an idiot and now I know why :)

i'd guess that 80-90% of the homes in our zip code are pre-WWII and we have little kids so it's definitely something we've looked into. you might have some exposure in an old house but if it is well-maintained you should be okay. there are ways of reducing the risk significantly. make sure there is no peeling paint. windows, porches, and doorways are the main culprits afaik. put down new mulch around the perimeter of the house, and take off your shoes when you come inside. mop regularly, wipe down services regularly.

we are renting in a place right now that was built in 1908 and has major peeling paint on various parts of the original windows, but only in between the exterior and the interior, e.g. the sills in between the storm windows and the regular windows, not the interior sills though. we just don't open our windows, which sucks but it's not worth the risk. if we owned this place we'd either have the windows professionally restored and re-stained or just replaced. the place we are trying to buy has newer windows, which helps w/ the lead stuff even if they are not historic or original.

if you do any work you should find a lead-certified contractor so they don't do it stupidly and make the situation worse by getting lead dust everywhere.

Flying across the country today to try and find a house in two days. I sent the realtor that we're working with a list of a dozen houses and he wrote back that six of them have been sold already. So whatever he has access to apparently beats zillow in timeliness and accuracy.

anyway that kinda sucks I'm sorry marcos! fire everyone involved.

― The Jams Manager (1992, Brickster) (El Tomboto), Wednesday, April 12, 2017 12:31 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea it's a bummer. paying the difference seems like a horrible option, so does taking on private mortgage insurance because the loan-to-value is now different, fuck both of those options really. we'll see what happens. we are able to walk away if we want to or negotiate with the seller to come down closer to the appraised value.

Realtors sometimes have inside info or secret leads, or so I've heard. Mine didn't.

zillow ime is not up to date at all, it can be weeks before a house that is under contract shows up as such in zillow. redfin is far superior and is as up to date as the MLS

Zillow is garbage. For a number of reasons, but mainly because it keeps appraising my house at about half of what I bought it for (and under half of what I could probably sell it for today). Redfin ain't tryin' to fuck me like that.

i'd highly recommend downloading the redfin app and specify the criteria you want (for us i just have them send me all single-family houses in my zip code) and if you want you get notifications when new listings show up, when they go under contract, when they sell. it has been extremely useful not just for hearing about new listings but also for getting a sense of what the market is

the only thing zillow is better than redfin at ime is getting the for-sale-by-owner houses

I'm trying to figure out why my next door neighbor has their house listed so insanely below both the county assessor value (which is probably too high) and other estimates. Short sale? I'd ask them, but "hey, are you broke and bailing out of your home?" isn't exactly casual conversation

xp as far as I've seen, zillow has more coverage than redfin at this point. No redfin in my area.

oh that is true, redfin doesnt serve every location

Yeah no Redfin coverage in my future town. Zillow and realtor.com and the local realtor sites all seem to show the same availability for me so at least they're all wrong.

I'm trying to figure out why my next door neighbor has their house listed so insanely below both the county assessor value (which is probably too high) and other estimates. Short sale? I'd ask them, but "hey, are you broke and bailing out of your home?" isn't exactly casual conversation

― a landlocked exclave (mh 😏)

Is real estate in your area hot right now? Maybe he wants a bidding war that'll end up with people going over market.

uhh yeah you don't price a house recently appraised at $160k at $110k to trigger a bidding war

That definitely sounds like a short sale situation.

You do (sometimes) in California.

My house is 1939/40. There is probably some lead in it, but if so it's way down under 15 layers of other paint.

The consensus among most homeowners hereabouts is that it would be more dangerous to strip everything off for abatement - and risk stirring old shit up - than to leave it be. Unless you're doing pretty serious renovation anyway.

So long as the children don't regularly gnaw on the windowsills, it's probably fine. There's like 20 other, easier ways for a house to kill you.

so we were able to work a deal w/ the sellers. they came down quite a lot, not quite to the appraisal price, but after a few rounds of negotiation we arrived at a number we were comfortable with. i think they felt they got a bum deal by a conservative appraiser, i don't agree, but whatever. we're happy w/ how it worked out.

weird, are houses not selling? sounds like a situation where I'd be tempted to bounce the deal and reappraise, but I'm glad it worked out for you

i think the sellers were in a bind bc they are under contract for another place of their own, and they really needed the funds from this sale for their down payment. they could've gone back on the market and maybe gotten a better price from another buyer but it would've complicated their own purchase

houses definitely selling though

ahh yeah, that's a weird situation. whoever was buying my friend's house dropped in at the last minute "oh, btw, our lease doesn't end yet so we can't close for two more months" and somehow the negotiated change was my friend, and the seller of the home they were buying, basically bought out the lease

there had to be a more graceful way of handling it, but it reaffirms my suspicion that real estate transactions are dark magic

there are serious deals in East Cleveland:

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/15602-Oakhill-Rd_Cleveland_OH_44112_M48697-50100#photo0

forest hills is like this weird little oasis in east cleveland

has anyone contested their county's assessment? I have a couple weeks to do so and was going to cite the sale price of a couple houses on my block this year, but with the exception of the neighbor short-selling... sales are good

the house in dumb Urblanda Ill-annoy that we've been trying to sell for almost TWO YEARS just got an offer! we've not paid the mortgage in almost a year so this is "short sale" territory, meaning the bank has to agree to take a loss, judging that it's better to take the money now rather than foreclose and try to sell it themselves.

the lesson I've learned: never live in the American midwest ever again.

isn't urbana a smaller college town? the market tends to be a lot different in college scenes, a lot of people gunshy to buy due to the whole adjunct instructor thing

C-U metro area over 200k pop so it's not particularly small. uni hiring freeze due to dumb no budget thing for the last two years hasn't helped.

good luck euler hope you can dump that place soon

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/15602-Oakhill-Rd_Cleveland_OH_44112_M48697-50100#photo0

That is one sweet house for $185K.

Yeah, whoa. Holy shit!

On saturday I bought a house in a midwest college town (east lansing) and the market - or at least the speed with which houses are being sold - was crazy. I sent the realtor a list of 12 houses that I was interested in on Tuesday afternoon, and when I met with him Thursday morning 7 of those were already sold, including a number that had been on the market for a while. It's the time of year when all the new faculty hires are finalized and people were showing up to house shop.

I looked at 15 houses in a 24 hour period and ended up putting in an offer on a place that went on the market the afternoon I got there; the photographer was just leaving when I showed up to see it. The only house I saw that I really loved and could imagine living in long-term instead of as a stopgap, or that would require a lot of updates. It's also in an area half a mile from campus but zoned in a way that disallows single family homes to be operated as rental units, so no chance of having a bunch of dirtbag undergrads living within a couple of blocks.

I live in a college town that also tries to prevent detached houses from becoming student housing, including not allowing basement apartments to be rented separately. But homeowners have found plenty of workarounds, so there's still a good chance you'll have loads of dirtbag undergrads living nearby. There are effectively basement apartments that don't quite meet the legal definition of a basement apartment (if there's no stove in the kitchen but merely a two-burner cooktop and a big countertop oven, it's not legally a kitchen, and thus not legally a separate apartment). Or you can do what I do, rent to students whilst living in the same house and just sharing the whole place instead of cordoning off part of it for rental, which is always allowed here. There are various workarounds for renting your whole house to students too, not to mention lots of homeowners who do it illegally and hope they won't get noticed - which they usually don't unless the tenants cause trouble.

Fortunately, most of the undergrads I've met here, including the 15 or so I've rented to over the years, aren't dirtbags at all.

I mostly love that Cleveland house, but that tiny, cheaply remodeled kitchen is a head-scratcher. Except the sink which is awesome.

The college town I'm in now is physically divided by hills into four roughly equal quadrants, and one of them is almost entirely populated by several thousand undergrads. There are a few die-hard faculty - ones who have been around for ages or others who love the older homes - who live there and on a regular basis have to deal with fights, noise, petty vandalism, drunk kids trying to open your door at 2am because they have the wrong house, etc. Please note that I say this as someone who was a dirtbag undergrad myself.

There are a good number of students living in the other three hills (none of which have any rules about rental property as far as I've ever heard) but they are self-selecting as the type who don't get involved in and don't want to deal with that kind of shit, and that's fine with me. The previous owners of the new place have lived in the place for 18 years and are moving to a different state so I think it probably won't be a total couch-burning dystopia.

congratulations joygoat!!

Good job everyone!
Good luck Euler!

I live in southern california and my parents aren't rich so buying a house: impossible?

There's always over the hill (Palmdale/Lancaster, Hesperia, etc)

take those santa clarita transit busses to commute to downtown/century city for like 4 hours total round trip.. ugh

people seem to either give up on the house for now and buy a condo or buy a house they plan to fix up over time

congrats joygoat!

On saturday I bought a house in a midwest college town (east lansing) and the market - or at least the speed with which houses are being sold - was crazy. I sent the realtor a list of 12 houses that I was interested in on Tuesday afternoon, and when I met with him Thursday morning 7 of those were already sold

my brother and his family are moving a MI college town (not yours) and they said it's the same way. even being just a few hours' drive away has made it that much harder for them to buy a place. it's like that here in cleveland, too, but only in certain neighborhoods. we definitely had an advantage renting in town before buying, the house we bought we saw it, put an offer in, and had the offer accepted all within hours of it being on the market. photos weren't even up until the next day.

also do we have a home improvement / home ownership thread? we are already tallying all the projects we want to do. i strangely thought i would be relieved when this is all over but now i have to call a bunch of contractors, painters, etc.

Congrats, joygoat.
Hey ILX, if you don't mind living in a horrible racist economically-depressed-by-design part of the country, come buy my mom's house.

https://ap.rdcpix.com/406636362/b9acfbac62f4e7d8ffe798ae2849b075l-m0xd-w1020_h770_q80.jpg

whoa! where is that?

wow, it's..... a colonial