Buying A House: C or D?

What else are you all leaving behind?

https://i.imgur.com/SWP9toe.png

Christian babies

oh god the English house-buying system is ridiculous as everything takes SOOO LONG

― kinder, Friday, 6 July 2018 12:22 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I’m selling my london flat right now and it’s taken 6 months to unpick the feudal freehold/leasehold tangle to the satisfaction of the buyers.

Yeah selling our flat was a terrible experience

Modern building is rubbish, everyone I know whose moves into a new or nearly new house across three continents has had no end of issues with shitty workmanship, poor design and crappy materials.

That's so true! Is building high quality houses really a lost art?

I don't know if it's like this everywhere, but around here the difference between pre and post WWII houses is crazy. Everything just went to shit

It is possible to get a new house built well, but you have to be involved, commodity builders just don’t give a fuck.

Especially as many are building for buy to let landlords who equally don’t give a fuck. We’ve just tried to get the bathroom regrouped and sealed by ge landlord because water is deep behind the tiles and into the walls and floor. The landlord just declined to do it after getting the quote, it’s a few hundred dollars. There will be a much more expensive expensive rot problem in a few years.

Oh well we did our duty as tenants to report it now it’s his problem. In the mean time the balcony got hit by a truck again, which means more water is getting into the balcony woodwork - more rot to come.

Plywood is worse now but much safer. Drywall is better now than 50 years ago. Contemporary lumber is predictably much worse. Whenever possible I go to the architectural salvage yard to pick up lumber for my projects.

Advanced modern techniques for creating energy efficient homes are the best they’ve ever been, but builders have to be conscientious and said methods and materials in order for them to actually work.

I want to hear about more yard upkeep shakedowns.

I don't know if it's like this everywhere, but around here the difference between pre and post WWII houses is crazy. Everything just went to shit

― Dan I.

the shitty pre-wwii houses aren't around anymore for comparison.

my pre-WWII house is way sturdier, but I sometimes envy the room sizes and storage space of newer houses

I envy modern 2x6 framing that allows you to hide DWV pipes inside the walls.

UK ILXORS ONLY should i tip the removal guys?

Oh yeah, true point about survival bias arising from the shitty older houses being long gone by now

I want to hear about more yard upkeep shakedowns.

ha, well, it's been pretty quiet. We got a couple of tree guys to come out and give bids on proper trimming on our side. On a day when we were out with the arborist I see the neighbor's son coming up the sidewalk. He saw us with the arborist, turned around, left, and I didn't see him again for a week or more

Suffice to say it's been a bit awkward with them, but he's not brought it up again.

what a choad

According to our viewing today they way to get a newer house that doesn’t suck is to buy one that an architect built to live in her/himself. Totally boss and well build house but definitely on the strength end of things price wise.

The other data point from anothe vieing was that I’m not going to buy your house if you have scented candles burning during the viewing.

Karl Malone (the ilxor) RT'ed this one today.

Hell, I’ll take it

“Stronghold” & “citadel” are underused RE descriptors imo

Two things to notice here:

https://i.imgur.com/Bxz8aQm.png

1.) The ladder up against the window and 2.) the Google time stamp of SIX YEARS AGO.

is the place near a freeway? that looks like one of those DOT-installed noise barrier walls

UK ILXORS ONLY should i tip the removal guys?

― lana del boy (ledge), Friday, 6 July 2018 14:17 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i gave them £20 which is like 1.3% lol. one guy did a great job, his young apprentice a bit more lackadaisical. can't wait to do all this again in a few weeks when we move out of storage into the house!

i also helped shift everything into the unit which was probably a more significant contribution.

Sparkle: No, I think it's just the owners "emphasizing a recurring motif."

https://i.imgur.com/75lnwjV.jpg?1

Wow, it really blends into the surroundings at practically Sea Ranch level of architectural consideration

It looks like the entire thing is made out of corrugated cardboard.

My first thought was that someone ran out of money during construction, but the listing says it was built in 1979, so maybe someone ran out of money during renovations.

See, my first thought was that it was from around that time anyway. I grew up in these little towns not much older than I was where the architecture was "bold" and "different" and "difficult to heat" and "prone to mildew".

Not a house, but I was reminded of this edifice, thought to be pretty hip back in 1980, but is now home to the town chiropractor.

https://i.imgur.com/VcGIEGg.jpg

I will never ever understand people who install tiny windows on purpose.

Been waiting three days to exchange, no obstacles except that apparently the two solicitors are unable to talk to each other. I believe this is a common complaint but wtf.

how cautious are you people about damp in old houses? if there's been treatment in the last decade and there are no signs of damp other than meter readings of the walls taken from near floor level, is this a dealbreaker? not sure how much effort to expend placating hypothetical future buyers

just dealt with this very issue as a buyer, it is (in the uk) the buyer's responsibility to get a survey; if that shows up work needing doing then they're within their rights to negotiate the price down by the estimated cost. do you have any guarantees from the treatment?

yeah, my concern is that we will get the treatment done again and still get the same readings, in which case... ???

well we're getting the work done after purchase so anything after that is our (the buyers) problem. getting the seller to do the work before purchase, no idea if that's common or not... maybe we're the suckers here! if you've got guarantees i would've thought that would be a good bargaining chip.

that feeling when you get the keys to your new house and turn up and the old owners haven't moved all their stuff out yet...

ah, this happened to my friends recently, there was a lot of drinking wine in the garden

the seller is doing the work for us, it slowly moves on

I think that means all the stuff belongs to you, Ledge.

The worst thing is a nice note from the old owners making a gift of the ugly sofa they couldn’t be arsed to move to the tip themselves.

I don't know the details of this stuff but I suspect it's supposed to be explicitly spelled out in the contract (probably in a part no one reads).

My house had been empty when I bought it, but there were a few "staging items," i.e., a few pieces of furniture to give you an idea of what the place would look like when occupied.

Some of the things we didn't care about (they belonged to the listing agent, not the previous owners). But one was an absolutely lovely antique pub table (it fit the room exactly), and we asked for it to stay. But this was just a verbal arrangement, we didn't have it codified contractually.

Of course when we arrived we found the table gone - had to call frantically to get them to bring it back, which they did.

Britishers buying and selling a house - last time I did this you had to have buildings insurance in place on the new house from the completion date. Now it seems it needs to be from exchange which in our case might be a couple of weeks before completion. But I have buildings and contents insurance with the same provider so how does this work - can they move the buildings insurance from exchange but keep the contents insurance until completion? We're going away probably between exchange and completion so want to make sure our contents are insured.

I guess they're essentially two separate policies?

I've now owned my house for 4 years (+3 days) and three different listing sites are estimating it's nearly doubled in value, give or take a couple thousand. Stay put and hope for the best, or sell and move somewhere cheap? Nothing's keeping me here except for laziness and my very average job.

if you want to move out of the area, do it. if changing housing in the same area would mean a comparable or worse deal when it comes to location and price, stay

I have considered moving to a cooler social district but it’s less than a ten minute drive away and a one bedroom would be the cost of my mortgage. I mean, wtf? home maintenance sucks but that seems like a raw deal

JF where do you live? I think US real estate is going to flatline and/or go down soon. I kind of think I may have already missed a window for selling in NY (since inventory has gone up and people have slowed down on buying because of tax changes/rates). The last time I sold it was probably a little too early to get the max but the place I bought after has appreciated what I would've made anyway if I had stayed, so it wasn't a loss and it's much easier to maintain where I bought. Just live where you want to live.

u.s. real estate is hugely dependent on the market in which one actually lives--imo, real estate in metro boston isn't going down anytime soon b/c we just don't have the right number of houses. JF lives in atlanta iirc and doubling value certainly makes an interesting case to sell if one is not tied to that city.

Oh yeah, I think Atlanta should keep going up, unless the broader market tanks soon/black swan event. My first place I sold more than doubled and was still going up but I just really didn't want to live there anymore and wanted something easier.

I moved to Atlanta in 2011, bought a house in 2014 while the market was still sorta reasonable in various parts of the metro area, and have watched it explode in the 4 years since. If I were buying or renting now, there'd be nothing I could afford pretty much anywhere in Fulton county. I was just looking at estimates to see where things are at right now, but in all honesty I don't really want to sell and move. I'd probably have a hard time buying a comparable house to mine anyplace I'd want to live and keep my mortgage payment at $600 like it is now.

That is quite a reasonable mortgage. I suppose the best would be to hang on to it and save, move when prices go down again, rent house out until prices go up and you can sell. Seems like the market shouldnt influence too much of your decision if its not an investment property and you plan to buy in the same area.