Home buying thread

Convo

Convo

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Just locked in last week at 5%! I went FHA. I got a place for 153k. 2 years ago it would of went for 225K easy. I know a guy down the street who paid 215k. I did get a foreclosure tho. Great shape too! For some reason they decided to put a brand new kitchen in instead of paying their taxes...I didn"t check this whole thread but I keep hearing rumors the tax credit is being raised to 15k? Anyone else read that? I know last year it was intended before the 8k but this is something new.
 
Cutlery

Cutlery

Kill All the White People
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Cad said:
700-767k buys you like a 1900 sq ft 1920"s 3 bedroom bungalow in this school district. The "decent" houses start at 900-1 mil. The median sales price is around 1.5 mil. I"m looking at foreclosures in less desireable parts of the neighborhood or along a higher-traffic road in order to get some smokin deals, and that"s the $900k figure.
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Heh, got my kid into the elementary magnet school of arts and science, that place has some serious budget, set of guitars for music class, full fledged science lab, gigantic library. Sure beats the shit outta the crappy district I went to. I"m just happy doesn"t require a million dollar investment to get in
 
Cad

Cad

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TheCutlery said:
Heh, got my kid into the elementary magnet school of arts and science, that place has some serious budget, set of guitars for music class, full fledged science lab, gigantic library. Sure beats the shit outta the crappy district I went to. I"m just happy doesn"t require a million dollar investment to get in
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Dallas has some really awesome magnet schools - and by awesome, I mean stupidly badass awesome (School for the Talented & Gifted - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) but very few kids get in each year and if you live in Dallas School District and your kids don"t get in the Magnet, you pretty much go private or move. The rest of the district (even in the northern, "wealthy" part of Dallas) is rural-Mississippi style horrible. I"d rather not take the chance. If your kid(s) got in the magnet schools locally, good on ya.

Edit: For clarity, I"m referring to the Highland Park School District.Highland Park Independent School District - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Cutlery

Cutlery

Kill All the White People
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Cad said:
Dallas has some really awesome magnet schools - and by awesome, I mean stupidly badass awesome (School for the Talented & Gifted - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) but very few kids get in each year and if you live in Dallas School District and your kids don"t get in the Magnet, you pretty much go private or move. The rest of the district (even in the northern, "wealthy" part of Dallas) is rural-Mississippi style horrible. I"d rather not take the chance. If your kid(s) got in the magnet schools locally, good on ya.

Edit: For clarity, I"m referring to the Highland Park School District.Highland Park Independent School District - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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You wanna know the extensive application process to get into the magnet school? We had to fill out a form stating the child"s name, address, and birthday. Then we were accepted

It"s pretty sweet really. The teachers seem to actually give a shit. During the summer one of them goes on expeditions to study various crap.

Sorry about the rural Mississippi shit. no one should have to deal with that.
 
Hatorade

Hatorade

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Offer accepted doing inspection this Friday, that went much better than expected. We sent them an offer of 94k and they pay 3k closing costs they came back with accepted, no counter offer or anything which has me a little worried but whatever we are happy with that price. Baring any crazy inspection problems we should be in by end of Oct, excitement all around.

For those that care it is a 1500 square foot one story built in 1998 with brand new roof/AC/fence. Huge Patio and the cover is part of the roof, large back yard and huge kitchen with walk in pantry. Everything we wanted except the living room layout is a little funky. Pics comming Sat after inspection.
 
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Northerner_foh

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Sorry for not keeping up but where the hell are you Hatorade?

Without going into real estate fights (and yeah, Calgary is not the best place in the world right now), what are you seeing? Our market is supposed to be flat-ish now but when I offered 270 for what was supposed to be worth 350 six months ago, I got snide and whatever. My agent tells me the offer is solid but the response was not nice.

I"ll tell ya, I think I am destined to never own and that might be best. Fuck it, rentals are more fun anyhow.
 
Cutlery

Cutlery

Kill All the White People
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Northerner said:
Sorry for not keeping up but where the hell are you Hatorade?

Without going into real estate fights (and yeah, Calgary is not the best place in the world right now), what are you seeing? Our market is supposed to be flat-ish now but when I offered 270 for what was supposed to be worth 350 six months ago, I got snide and whatever. My agent tells me the offer is solid but the response was not nice.

I"ll tell ya, I think I am destined to never own and that might be best. Fuck it, rentals are more fun anyhow.
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Meh, it"s one person. If they really feel their property is worth more, let them sit on it until someone agrees with them. Like I said earlier in the thread, there was a house a block over that has been on the market for over a full year (Might be closer to 18 months now) for 250 or something in that ballpark when it"s maybe a 190k house. They haven"t dropped the price at all, and seem fairly content with waiting until the market recovers, since they clearly aren"t that motivated to sell. Fuck em.

From what I understand, we owe this property to the bank"s realtor. It was a short sale when we bid on it, but there was no way the paperwork could be done before the redemption period for the foreclosure was up, so the bank sat on approving the offer until they outright owned it. Once they did, they wanted to relist the property as a foreclosure and start over, but the realtor convinced them that they had a good offer on the table already and was ready to go.

There are definitely days I wish I was still renting however. Everything in a home is a fucking project. Rescreening the patio door took fucking half a day because I couldn"t figure out how to get the storm doors off, and eventually I just kicked the shit outta the screen door frame to get it off of the track. Shortly after I started looking around for new screen doors, I figured out the trick. 3 trips to home depot later I finally got that done, but one of the wheels was rusted out and snapped off in the process, so it still opens and closes like shit. Any plumbing with a compression joint is a pain in the ass and a half (fixing the old owner"s lazyness with their icemaker fridge and getting my own set up was about 6 times more work than it should have been), all the painters tape is peeling the paint when we take it off, the carpet we wanted to replace in the basement immediately is backordered for 4-6 weeks, and the kid"s school (up until yesterday) was playing games with us about not getting a bus stop reasonably close to our home since we signed up for the district a week after the deadline (which wasn"t our fault, we didn"t know if we were gonna get the home or not).

All of this is easily avoided by renting, but I gotta admit, not paying $2.50 to do a load of laundry is pretty sweet.
 
Hatorade

Hatorade

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Northerner said:
Sorry for not keeping up but where the hell are you Hatorade?

Without going into real estate fights (and yeah, Calgary is not the best place in the world right now), what are you seeing? Our market is supposed to be flat-ish now but when I offered 270 for what was supposed to be worth 350 six months ago, I got snide and whatever. My agent tells me the offer is solid but the response was not nice.

I"ll tell ya, I think I am destined to never own and that might be best. Fuck it, rentals are more fun anyhow.
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Houston, TX.

Sellers agent is a inconsiderate prick and forced us to cancel the inspection on the home like one hour before it was setup because he took two days and the last min to let the owner know and she winds down at 5PM(old lady) so we on for Monday. This waiting sucks ass and he is fucking up my work schedule now.
 
Dis

Dis

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Hatorade said:
Offer accepted doing inspection this Friday, that went much better than expected. We sent them an offer of 94k and they pay 3k closing costs they came back with accepted, no counter offer or anything which has me a little worried but whatever we are happy with that price. Baring any crazy inspection problems we should be in by end of Oct, excitement all around.

For those that care it is a 1500 square foot one story built in 1998 with brand new roof/AC/fence. Huge Patio and the cover is part of the roof, large back yard and huge kitchen with walk in pantry. Everything we wanted except the living room layout is a little funky. Pics comming Sat after inspection.
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Congratz!
 
Eomer

Eomer

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Northerner said:
Sorry for not keeping up but where the hell are you Hatorade?

Without going into real estate fights (and yeah, Calgary is not the best place in the world right now), what are you seeing? Our market is supposed to be flat-ish now but when I offered 270 for what was supposed to be worth 350 six months ago, I got snide and whatever. My agent tells me the offer is solid but the response was not nice.

I"ll tell ya, I think I am destined to never own and that might be best. Fuck it, rentals are more fun anyhow.
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Some people just aren"t realistic about what their house is worth, and like it or not, there"s a lot of personal emotional investment in your house. My parent"s neighbour has been trying to sell his house for 6 months, and is refusing to drop his price even though he"s not gotten a sniff.

Unfortunately the back story is that they built the house about 6 years ago, in one of the nicer areas of the city. They knocked a house down beside my parents, and then went around the neighborhood asking people to approve a variance for what they wanted to build on the lot, because there"s specific requirements for set backs from property lines, total area covered by the house etc and they were somewhat past them. My parents approved it even though they"re directly beside them, because the couple seemed nice and it wasn"t like they were trying to build a castle on a 50" lot.

Apparently they had no taste whatsoever. The house is big, and apparently the interior is fairly well done as well as the back yard, but the house from the street is fucking awful. Terrible choices in brick etc, landscaping consists of a large boulder in the middle of their lawn for no apparent reason, and get this: the second floor of the house has vinyl siding. Vinyl fucking siding in an area where the only houses worth less than 1m are 50+ years old with no work and falling apart. He"s asking for 1.2m for it, which the house may well be worth in terms of the interior space, lot/yard and so on. But any person in their right mind would pull up to the house, take one look at it from the street and say "why the fuck would I pay 1.2m for a house with vinyl siding on it?" Don"t get me wrong, that"s not the only problem with the exterior, but that just gives an indication of the taste or lack thereof.

Unfortunately the wife died last year from cancer, and he wants to move on, but at the same time I"m sure that he"s having a difficult time tempering his expectations because he built the place with her. Kinda sad really, I feel bad for the guy, but his house is easily the ugliest within a 5 block radius.
 
Hatorade

Hatorade

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Inspection went great, team of two sat me down with color photos and listing each thing that is wrong. After everything is said and done I am going to have to buy an exhaust cap for the water heater on the roof and some exterior paint and caulk...20 bucks in maintence and a 10 dollar part for the exhaust. We set aside a couple thousand for any repairs but now we may just put that toward new flooring. So far this has been an awesome experiance, pics up tonight.
 
Dis

Dis

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Hatorade said:
Inspection went great, team of two sat me down with color photos and listing each thing that is wrong. After everything is said and done I am going to have to buy an exhaust cap for the water heater on the roof and some exterior paint and caulk...20 bucks in maintence and a 10 dollar part for the exhaust. We set aside a couple thousand for any repairs but now we may just put that toward new flooring. So far this has been an awesome experiance, pics up tonight.
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Honestly, get the buyer to do that if you can. Hell I did it for my buyers, same shit, water heater cap.

Get those pics up.
 
Hatorade

Hatorade

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My first reaction is I want to do it because I will need to eventually anyhow, never get to be a handy man in my apartments and need to learn ASAP. I am not some great carpenter but I learn quick and I finally get to buy tools. Weather should be nice for it as well come Oct/Nov.

Also pics I just got from my agent, good timing. More once I get the ones I took.
 
Ryoz

Ryoz

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Damn dude, looks pretty good. I"m jealous of the market there... that"s a very nice looking place and hardly 10 years old.

Congrats!
 
Hatorade

Hatorade

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r3probate said:
I think it needs more crosses in the living room, but other than that, congrats man. Home ownership is great.
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Haha yeah she a nice old lady that like the cross I guess, no idea what I am going to do with that corner. Thinking maybe expanded the shelving out and over connecting to the fireplace area and fill it with family pictures or something.
 
Hatorade

Hatorade

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Some more, mainly of living room still to get a better look at how kitchen ties in and the last one is the pantry. Will keep the painting pics in the home improvement thread once we get that going. Rest of the pics are just boring bedrooms and bathrooms.
 
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Cryptin_foh

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Hatorade said:
Houston, TX.

Sellers agent is a inconsiderate prick and forced us to cancel the inspection on the home like one hour before it was setup because he took two days and the last min to let the owner know and she winds down at 5PM(old lady) so we on for Monday. This waiting sucks ass and he is fucking up my work schedule now.
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Grats man. There"s nothing better than owning your own home. My fiance and I thought about building a house in Texas but she didn"t want to be away from her family in another state. Currently we"re building a 1 story 3700 sqft on a property we own down here in Louisiana. What we will be paying we could of gotten a better deal in Texas. We"re in the process of getting our construction loan and start building from there.
 
Cutlery

Cutlery

Kill All the White People
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Hatorade said:
My first reaction is I want to do it because I will need to eventually anyhow, never get to be a handy man in my apartments and need to learn ASAP. I am not some great carpenter but I learn quick and I finally get to buy tools. Weather should be nice for it as well come Oct/Nov.

Also pics I just got from my agent, good timing. More once I get the ones I took.
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I hope you know where the nearest Home Depot/Lowes is, and I hope it"s close.

Mine is right down the street, and the only thing saving me from doubling the amount of time it takes to do shit. I gotta run down there easily 6 times a day on my days off. Wrong part, wrong tool, don"t have the right tool, blah blah blah.

Blows ass coming from a house where Dad had everything you could possibly conceive of (fucking 60 gal air compressor, welding torch + acetylene tanks, amongst other things) and starting off with a friggin 1 sq foot toolbox.
 
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