Home buying thread

chu said:

That"s your prerogative, I"m just giving you my personal experience with it. It"s not just the loud people that are particularly annoying; it"s the vehicles that come with them too. It"s basically giant rush-hour traffic before and after the game. A 5 min trip to the Safeway suddenly takes 30 due to foot and car traffic that you have to drive through.

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Get a game schedule, *redacted*

----Though better of that one

Wizarddeath said:

Let us know what happens Tenks! My seller approved the offer on the 8th, and it was submitted to BoA on 8th/9th, but I haven"t heard anything back, and probably won"t until the end of the month at the earliest I"m guessing. I actually tried to call the BoA short sell department today to see if they would release any information to me, and of course they wouldn"t have to be the seller, or sellers agents.

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Yeah I kind of hate the waiting game. I need to let my apartment complex if I"m leaving by March 31. Of course I need to give a 60 day notice that I"m vacating so I"ll probably have to buy 2 months of rent from them, which will cost me around 1700 =/ I really doubt I"ll hear from the bank before the end of this month. Hopefully I can so I only need to buy one month of rent from the apartment complex.

My agent says he has most of the numbers for the head of short sale departments at most banks so hopefully he can bulldog the bank into making a timely decision.

Yeah my rent right now is 729/mo and that includes my pet fee which is $25. The rent price is going up to 755/mo base without the pet fee. So I"m probably going to forget my cat exists and stop paying the extra money for the time being. The higher cost is because they"re wanting something like $920/mo for month-to-month rent. My mortgage with insurance, tax and HOA will be like $940 or something.

chu said:

That"s your prerogative, I"m just giving you my personal experience with it. It"s not just the loud people that are particularly annoying; it"s the vehicles that come with them too. It"s basically giant rush-hour traffic before and after the game. A 5 min trip to the Safeway suddenly takes 30 due to foot and car traffic that you have to drive through.

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Again, that"s kind of the point of living in a dense, urban environment. Your comment about "driving 5 minutes to Safeway" is in itself kind of telling: there"s 2 grocery stores within a 5 minutewalkof my place with a third opening soon, along with corner stores etc. And that"s kind of the point: while I don"t know Calgary well at all, the Saddledome isn"t really all that well located and the concept is very much an arena surrounded by a parking lot, whereas Edmonton"s arena is replacing a couple dozens acres of parking lots with an arena, hotels, condos, student residences, and a lot of commercial space that are well integrated in to the surrounding area (hopefully).

Eomer said:

Again, that"s kind of the point of living in a dense, urban environment. Your comment about "driving 5 minutes to Safeway" is in itself kind of telling: there"s 2 grocery stores within a 5 minutewalkof my place with a third opening soon, along with corner stores etc. And that"s kind of the point: while I don"t know Calgary well at all, the Saddledome isn"t really all that well located and the concept is very much an arena surrounded by a parking lot, whereas Edmonton"s arena is replacing a couple dozens acres of parking lots with an arena, hotels, condos, student residences, and a lot of commercial space that are well integrated in to the surrounding area (hopefully).

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Sounds exactly like the Saddledome. You must not have visited in the last few years.

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Sorry, no. The Saddledome is a single building in a sea of parking lot space with the Stampede grounds and a massive exhibition hall right beside. It"s the antithesis of a properly integrated urban arena district.

And where do you think people park when they?
a) don"t want to pay 12$ for parking
b) don"t want to be stuck in the parking lot traffic for an hour after the game

Hint: Look at the area around Hotel Arts and it"s exactly as you described 2 posts above.

chu said:

And where do you think people park when they?
a) don"t want to pay 12$ for parking
b) don"t want to be stuck in the parking lot traffic for an hour after the game

Hint: Look at the area around Hotel Arts and it"s exactly as you described 2 posts above.

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There are something like 20,000 underground or surface parking stalls already existing within a kilometer of the arena, as well as 3-5 LRT stations within 500m once the new lines are built. Along with virtually every major road route in to and out of downtown. Conceptual drawings of what the arena and surrounding development may look like don"t resemble the Saddledome in any shape or fashion, because it was built 40 years ago when car culture was at it"s height. 60,000 people enter and exit the central business district every morning and afternoon rush hour just fine, I"m sure that the occasional hockey game or concert isn"t going to overwhelm things. Besides which, half the problem with Edmonton"s downtown is because there"s not ENOUGH going on most nights. Not because it"s too busy.

Not to mention that the whole idea is that significant numbers of people who go to the games work downtown and would likely walk or LRT from their office, while getting a bite or drink along the way before or after the game.

And for the second time, the arena and surrounding development arereplacingdozens of acres of existing surface parking stalls. Not adding more.

Eomer said:

There are something like 20,000 underground or surface parking stalls already existing within a kilometer of the arena, as well as 3-5 LRT stations within 500m once the new lines are built.

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20,000 is a big number. Where did you get this information? You"re probably including corporate parking stalls, which random people obviously can"t use...

I"d love to see 20,000 cars exit underground parking stalls at once.

Saddledome is also on the LRT line; makes no difference.

It"s been included in various proposals and presentations about the arena. Corporate stalls could be used since the games take place outside of general business hours, it would just be up to the corporations or their garage owners to come up with a system that works for everyone. I doubt that they"re going to let hundreds or thousands of stalls sit empty when they could be selling them for hockey games.

As far as 20,000 people exiting all at once, again, this would be from dozens of surface and underground lots and buildings spread over a large radius. And of course it wouldn"t be nearly that many anyway, unless no one used transit and everyone drove there by themselves. As it stands Rexall essentially has two lots with basically 3 entrances/exits, most people drive to the game, and the area copes fine. The downtown location is much more suitable to such crush loads because they"d be much more well distributed and there"s far more arterial roads and transit options nearby. Not to mention the hanging out before and after the game aspect that a properly designed district would provide that would further ease crush loads on roads, transit and parking.

Again, the Saddledome is a shitty comparison. Think Nationwide in Columbus, but with zero surface parking nearby:

<iframe width="425" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&amp;source=s_q&amp;hl=en&amp;geocode=&amp ;q=nationwide+arena+columbus&amp;aq=&amp;sll=49.89 1235,-97.15369&amp;sspn=33.830834,93.076172&amp;ie=UTF8& amp;hq=nationwide+arena&amp;hnear=Columbus,+Frankl in,+Ohio,+United+States&amp;ll=39.969406,-83.006206&amp;spn=0.018107,0.016306&amp;t=h&amp;ou tput=embed"></iframe><br /><small><a href="http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&amp;source=embed&amp;hl=en&amp;geocode=&a mp;q=nationwide+arena+columbus&amp;aq=&amp;sll=49. 891235,-97.15369&amp;sspn=33.830834,93.076172&amp;ie=UTF8& amp;hq=nationwide+arena&amp;hnear=Columbus,+Frankl in,+Ohio,+United+States&amp;ll=39.969406,-83.006206&amp;spn=0.018107,0.016306&amp;t=h" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map</a></small>

Home inspector said I need a new roof on the house i"m in contract on so i"m in talks with the guy about straight up putting a new roof on there and then i"ll order the appraisal.

My mortgage bitch wants to get the appraisal first, then if they appraiser calls it out too, have a roof inspection, then get the roof installed. All the way through filling out a bunch of fucking paperwork and if the appraiser doesn"t call it out -- not getting a new roof!

I"m about to let my downpayment ride on roullette so i can pay cash for this piece of shit and tell this mortgage fuckus to E A T M E.

Well I couldn"t find any foreclosed homes I liked so I went the exact opposite and bought a new house. They gave me pretty good deals.

The home started on the market at 180k and I got it for 170k. I got them to eat $2,500 of the closing costs but the biggest deal was they offered me a loan at a 4.375% rate. Playing with the numbers this meant it cost me per month like I was buying a 156k house at my pre-approved rate of 5.0% with PNC.

Overall it seems like a good deal. 3br/2.5ba ~1900 sqft. Brand new, hardwood floors in the kitchen, entrance, hall bath. Huge master bath w/ a shower and jacuzzi tub. Cherry cabinets in the kitchen.

I"m going back through it Saturday. I can snap some photos. Though there is still some debris on the inside and the carpet is covered in plastic so it doesn"t look too hot at the moment.

Sigh still waiting on bank approval from my submission on February 3rd.

Talked to the other Realtor today, the sellers have been dragging their feet, but dropped off the requested additional paperwork to the bank today. Don"t know what this could be, promissory note?

Hopefully we hear back this week, as it sounds like this should be the last go around from the back. We planned to close before March 31st, and with how the seller is, it would suck to have to wait on them to sign more papers, as well as the house be left empty and rotting any longer...

did not want to start a new thread for this so I apologize in advance if this is a bit off topic.

heard about this on the radio and it sounds a bit to good to be true but it sounds like a less expensive way to get into real estate.

was just wondering what some of you think of it.

http://www.property23.com/properties.php

thanks, I thought as much but it sounded so good lol.