For anyone that has bought a house

[paleck]

These are my thoughts on buying a house for the first time right now.

http://paleck.com/archives/2006/05/homeowner_or_homeless.php

For about the last month or two I've been deciding and looking at different options. And through looking at all the different options for loans, terms and contracts (and anything else I have forgotten), I've decided two things. First that you have to be crazy to even think about buying a house and second that you have to be crazy to not buy a house.

Going back to the first thing, you would have to be crazy to buy a house. Searching for a house is hard enough. You basically have to make your decisions based off of a 5-10 minute tour of the property. Let me put that in context for an $150,000 condo/house and a seven minute tour, each of those minutes are worth approximately $21,428.57. Next up you put together an offer with your real estate agent. This is probably about 10 pages of legalese of how many different ways you can screw eachother over. Yes, I understand that a lot of it is to protect the buyer and seller from eachother, but still. If anyone else has bought or sold a house you know what I am talking about.
IF your offer is accepted or countered(which I am not going to go into) then you still have about a month's worth of work. Now if memory serves once you agree on the terms and the price next you have to go apply for your loan if you don't already have financing. Then there is a whole slew of things that need to be done. Property inspection, appraisals(so you know how much you are being screwed by), getting a title company. The list goes on and on and on.

Now if you opt for never buying a home and only renting you are still crazy. This one is much easier to explain. Say you pay $750 in just rent every month, that is $9,000 dollars a year, $45,000 in 5 years and $90,000 in 10 years. In other words you are throwing $9,000 down the toilet every year. It's not doing anything for you. It's going to someone else to pay off their mortgage or into someone's bank account for them to retire on.

So now that I am going through this I am beginning to the think the homeless have it right, sleep on the streets with no rent or mortgage to pay. As for me I'll continue my quest to become homeowner, broke with no room for error and utterly insane. In other news I am planning for my insanity early, if anyone is looking for a condo to rent I may be able to accomdate them as I will have a new address at the closest Mental Hospital.

 

[RandomDeadHead]

Thats why I decided to build my own house. Or rather hired a contractor to build it for me. Got the house I wanted at the price I wanted, with no ****ing realitors.

 

[Lyle]

I guess we've been lucky on the homebuying front. We had such a great experience working with the agent who helped us buy our first home that we went back to her when it was time to move up to a bigger house.

It is definitely kind of scary and crazy the first time you go through the process, but once it's all over and you're settled in to your new house the memories of all the problems will begin to fade. For example, I can now only barely remember that call from Countrywide, on the morning that we were going to close on our first house, telling me that I needed to fax proof of my college graduation to them immediately or else we couldn't go through with it. Yes, that was a fun day.

 

[ejb190]

I know exactly what you are talking about!!!

I hope to close on a house next week. Insurance is the only hold up right now. (That and getting a date that the seller, my fiancé, and I can all be there). It’s a bit nerve racking as I never did find the “perfect” place, but this one comes a lot closer then any of the others. Funny how I found a great location, a great layout, the garage I need, a nice landscape, and room for my office, just not all in the same place! But I am out of time and really need to find a place.

 

[balamw]

I guess we've been lucky on the homebuying front.

Me too. We've had much more than 5-10 minute tours of any house we've seriously considered * and have had excellent real estate agents that have been worth their weight in gold (about what they took home too ).

Selling on the other hand... We got to see a large number of let's just say sub-par real estate agents representing the potential buyers of our last house. Even the best one, whe was representing the buyers we settled on, was quite unprofessional at times. And the buyers we thought were so solid flaked out on us a bit at the end since their funds were delayed and they were demanding a repair we had already agreed on not doing and thus almost derailing the purchase of our new home. My agent and I had to make a couple of nasty phone calls to the buyer to get his act together.

* Of course there have been some houses the agent thought we might want to look at that we didn't even get out of the car for they just weren't right for us from the curb.