Buying A House: C or D?

Table, you can have my yard, I'm tired of it.

...

Actually semi-seriously we are likely to sell our house soon, and buy a different one. For various reasons it won't be a simple transaction.

1. I mostly like the house despite its quirks. My wife... doesn't. The past year or so of having us all cooped up together has made it feel pretty claustrophobic. Cramped, dated, not in a good state of repair.

2. Renovating it to match modern expectations (like, a functional kitchen, a master bathroom, and decently-sized bedrooms) is just not feasible. Even if I could afford it (which I can't), the disruption of life while said renovations take place would be difficult in the extreme.

3. The value of the property (very desirable location and large lot) is 8 or 9 times the value of the house.

4. Therefore, I am tempted by the idea of selling it more or less as-is, for cash, to someone who will immediately gut and remodel it.

5. Given #4, is it even worth cleaning and painting and fixing things? With children and pets and -argh- LIFE going on, I'm not sure how we could do the traditional staging/showing rigamarole. We have 20 years worth of accumulated stuff, just getting to "staged" is itself a herculean effort, let alone the stress of living like that for an extended period.

6. Even if we got to a show-able state, people will notice the tiny kitchen, insultingly small rooms, and the cracks that I'm just not able to fix.

Maybe there's somewhere in between: just enough cosmetic fixes to make it look like a plausible place to live, with the almost-certain knowledge that the likely buyer will rip it all up and start again.

not an expert but if you're in an area with older homes where gut remodels are common i wouldn't do much to prep it for sale. there are two active gut remodels on my street right now and no one moved into them before work began.

Yeah, of the four houses on my block, two have been completely redone.

The temptation is strong, although it potentially means leaving an awful lot of money on the theoretical table. Like, I have received an online cash offer that is a hundred thousand quatloos below the "zestimate," but given all the costs involved in fixing things I suspect it may work out about the same.

5. Given #4, is it even worth cleaning and painting and fixing things?

probably not, but this depends on the location (expecations of curb appeal, how hot the market is) but ask a couple of local realtors for their take on this.

we have to basically gut the downstairs of the home we're living in. there's a 221 sq foot guest quarters. If we can make it into a "tiny home", maybe we can live there during renovations.

caek, you speak truth. Before I accept a lowball as-is offer I fully intend to get the opinion of some agents who are hip to the scene

as the kids say

if you're going to lose the use of multiple rooms including bathrooms and kitchen then i would be (very) surprised if you make enough profit doing it yourself to pay for 6-12 months of hell. especially if your spouse is keen to get out for other reasons!

it might makes sense to "self-flip" if there are no regular buyers for the unrenovated property and there isn't much of a community of professional flippers. where we live neither of those things are true.

flippers have somewhere else to live, the liquid cash to pay for the improvements, a GC/crew on hand to do the work, and they know exactly what the market likes. that's how they make a profit even though they have to pay a mortgage on an uninhabited property for a year. they're mostly inhuman scum, but they know what they're doing. i'm skeptical it's something with family obligations can just figure out evenings and weekends.

Yaaaaaay our very first HITCH

FFS

― cpt otm (darraghmac), Monday, 8 February 2021 13:27 (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Not a major hitch, signing contracts tomorrow iirc

Delighted for ye.

good luck darraghfolks

Nice detail

Our solicitor is so old school that he saw the entity known as mrs macs surname differed to mine and put us down as unmarried and prepared all docs as same without thinking to ask once in all the interactions

Have to locate marriage cert now but I remembered the date at least when put on the spot

Ahh love it. Good detail that.

Reminds me of going to see properties with my partner, realtors would try to find out if they should be pitching to me as the "wife" while I tried to stay out of it.

Realtor: "So you're married."
Me: "No."
Them: "So...you'll be living together?"
Me: "Nope!"
Them: "So...it's not serious?"
lol

We weren't married when we bought, but we're gay, so that's more normal or something lol. Also our realtor was one of the stupidest people I've ever encountered in my entire life.

We have 20 years worth of accumulated stuff, just getting to "staged" is itself a herculean effort, let alone the stress of living like that for an extended period.

As someone who has done this a few times, it's worth the effort not in terms of increased sale price but as a way of getting rid of a ton of junk before you have to pack it all up and move it to a new house

Them: "So...it's not serious?"

obviously buying property together is a fun idea for a second date activity

Iirc that conversation might have been with this person?

https://images.homesconnect.com/AccountData/150274463/stacybresciaspreerPhoto__9dd2e4da.jpg

When do you think that pic was taken? 1990?

how many bedrooms are in that hairdo?

without thinking to ask once in all the interactions

From experience, maybe sort of expect that from now on...
Also if you ask for a list of what is left for you to do, they are legally obliged* to only tell you the next thing and not the 10 other things after that.

*I can only surmise

So...it's not serious?

Dying here

I love when people get to this stage of asking me about either my current or origin story tbh, and believe me we always get to this stage

girlfriend in a mortgage I know, I know...

girlfriend in a дома

looking for an apartment in brooklyn is an existential crisis

congrats darragh

thread forced me to read the plot synopsis for Hitch, and i will never forgive this

At a speed dating cafe that Hitch sneaks into, Sara and Casey confront Hitch and cite Vance as their source. Hitch explains that not only did he refuse to work with him – men like Vance are the reason why women heavily protect themselves – but that same protection also unintentionally makes establishing genuine relationships with good men difficult enough to create a demand for Hitch's services.

ty forks

Sufjan the thread forced no such thing

2. Renovating it to match modern expectations (like, a functional kitchen, a master bathroom, and decently-sized bedrooms) is just not feasible. Even if I could afford it (which I can't), the disruption of life while said renovations take place would be difficult in the extreme.

idk where you live, but besides the headaches of doing the work, you might also need to deal with the headaches that are getting the permits to do the work (a lot of places are even slower about issuing permits than usual because covid)... and doing unpermitted construction on your house is probably not that great a thing to do if you are just about to sell it ... and considering you're already stretched financially, getting contractors in to do this stuff for you, sounds like it's not gonna happen. It is also probably likely that there is some couple or family that is currently living in a much smaller place that would find your home to be amazing and magical.

mortgage rates have retraced about a third of last year's descent pic.twitter.com/kJoWR5jZku

— 📈 Len Kiefer 📊 (@lenkiefer) March 5, 2021

Is that good or bad? Mortgages make no sense to me, which is probably why I’ll rent for the rest of my life.

whether it's good or bad depends on who you are. people wanting to buy houses will have higher interest rates than the near rock bottom lows last year. real estate people who make money selling houses might not sell as many houses. underwriters and other middlepeople in the mortgage industry might make less money because they are handling fewer loans (they get points on the package), because the super low rates inspired many people to refinance existing mortgages. The higher rates logically imply fewer re-fis to take advantage of lower rates.

Higher interest rates are good for banks because they receive the interest, and potentially good for things like pension funds and other investors that can generate better rates of return on relatively low-risk investments.

idk, maybe i'm totally not-otm ... this is a good Yerac question

it could potentially be good for renters, as if it costs more to get a mortgage, there might be fewer sales, as in, depending on tenant protections or lack thereof, the sale of a property can lead to evictions/large rent increases

Yeah you don’t have to tell me that part, we had to move last year bc the owner of our townhouse decided to sell it. Don’t think it was on the market for long.

just sayin' some places have laws where it is super cost prohibitive for new owners to evict existing tenants ...

like, if the tenant has been there for a long time and they are elderly and/or disabled -- if a new owner wants to evict them, the new owner is going to (rightfully in so many cases) have to pay a lot of money, such that it is a disincentive to evict the tenants or buy the property

I don't know a lot about fixed income, but only have been trying to keep up with it recently because the equities market keeps talking about US treasuries (mainly the 10 year) and rising yields and how that may finally burst several bubbles that have been going on (like stonks and bitcoin and real estate). I am not really on twitter but one or two people I read sometimes have been warning about the bond market and that we are finally going to see stock and real estate prices pull back sharply soon. I mean timing is always hard and people endlessly speculate so who knows.

Oh I guess I should say I definitely see a correlation in the last two weeks that I am adjusting my own timeline about buying something right now. So I am not saying that people are wrongly speculating and warning.

Aren't there two economist-y people on ilx?

oh ya flopson to thread

people/companies have definitely over-leveraged themselves to death everywhere. buy high/sell low.

👀

Notwithstanding that i think we're buying at a peak, tbh we sat out the last boom and the bust and reboom passed before we could get into any position to buy again.

We're able to buy now, we're buying to stay there for life, we can afford the monthly payments comfortably, we wont get through another, you gotta jump sometime.

oh yeah, i wanted to put in that disclaimer above about no one really knowing because people still need to make the decisions they need to make; you will never be able to perfectly time doing something like that and there are so many variables involved. I am hoping to just wait out March for my own situation and see where things end up.

Our market timing was decent the last time round (2007). But that was going from apartment to first house.

If we end up both selling and buying this year, whatever market conditions there are will cancel one another out. The current low inventory and high demand are good for us as sellers, but will bite us in the ass because we also need to live somewhere.

I theoretically should care more about interest rates than I do. But ultimately the right time to buy is the time that makes sense for our life. The difference between 2.x% and 3.x% is big, but it is spread over 30 years.

Or, what Yerac said

I’m out of my depth on the macro stuff, but I will say if you’re thinking of refinancing you should do it ASAP imo (or ideally last year)

Yeah thats key for us, to draw down now before end april if at all possible

I am really glad I was able to sell my place relatively quickly and was done with it at the end of Dec. I could not foresee that apt going for much more in the short to medium term.

I looked at refinancing like two months ago and got lazy about it and now it feels like it might not be worth it. We were going to cash out some equity and redo our kitchen but is it better to pay that out of savings to save several $k in closing costs for a not dramatically smaller rate? Goal is also to pay off sooner as we dropped daycare and car payments but we don’t need to refi to just pay more each month on the principle.

I really hate this kind of stuff hence getting lazy about going through with it

signed contract yesterday; got a 120 day rate lock at 2.825 - not sure we can do much better than that, ever. staying in the neighborhood too!