House Hunting Adventures - Special Soapbox Edition

[G-Man79]

ARGH! I hate the current housing market! It's absolutely infuriating. Not only are prices unnecessarily high due to the low int. rates, but people are bidding more than they ought to on houses driving the prices up even further! WTF!?!

Don't homebuyers realize that if we all calmed down, the market would calm down too? Hello!?

My fiancee and I bid on a great house last night. Decent neighborhood, excellent condition, but definitely needed some updates and repairs ($3K worth or so). So we bid $3K under the asking price because of those necessary repairs. There were two other bids that came in on Sunday. And guess what? BOTH of those bids were over asking price! Sheesh!

I hope those people are shivering their pancaking cheeks off come wintertime because they overpaid and couldn't afford to replace the windows that are 30 years old.

PANCAKING PANCAKE!

This is brutalizing than a root canal!

[Keyare]

Why would anyone bid OVER the asking price?

[morea]

^ I did... I bid $1000 over the asking price for the first house I wanted, because a lot of people wanted it... and I STILL lost the house to someone who bid $2000 over the asking price.

[morea]

incidentally, did I mention that I looked at 70 houses before I found the one I got? It was well worth it in the end though. Chin up!

[G-Man79]

We'll soldier on but the thing that gets me is that homebuyers don't realize that we can influence the market! The media and the marketing departments of the realty companies have whipped the market (here in NY at least) into a pancaking frenzy! It's very frustrating! There...that's enough exclamation points for the day.

!

[DivineDesign]

i'm sure that my soon to be house hunting adventures willbe fun...but the bf is very good at negotiating..so we'll see how that goes :)

[G-Man79]

There's not even an opportunity to negotiate DD. It's like buyers are completely at the mercy of sellers. Pure real estate chaos!

Where have you gone bear market?

[D-Zine]

My friend in Jax is havin a helluva time finding a house there DD. And they are about to bring about 6,000 NEW families there with the military! That's ALOT!

He can't find anything under $150 thats even worth looking at and I have seen the inside of what some of the homes there in that $150 range look like. My house looks better than those and I paid well under $150 but Jax is a happenin place - and its driving the cost up of the homes.

I hope you and Matt have much better luck than Andy is having!

[D-Zine]

G-MAN - you're right about not having a chance! Just ask defjoe here on GDF! He'll tell ya!

I only looked at about 20 diff houses and still bought the very first one I looked at bc I knew it was the one for me. The market doesn't appear to be as tough here in Savannah as there in Fla for NY I guess.

[G-Man79]

Yeah I guess it's a whole different story in the south. My mom is trying to sell her place in Charlotte and is having a difficult time selling and her price is beyond reasonable for her house. If my fiancee and I didn't have good jobs, I would definitely move out of NY.

[D-Zine]

Diff parts of the south are diff I guess. In Fla its about the same as where you are, from the ppl I have talked too. Savannah didn't seem so bad last year when I bought mine. I bid on the house, I got it. Of course I saw the house before it actually went on the market :D so that may have helped me some. My trouble came at the closing. It was a total and complete nightmare! LOL

[DivineDesign]

YEah DZ- Matt suggested maybe we get an apartment for like 6 months or so ...but...who knows.....we'll just see what happens i guess... :)

[D-Zine]

Might not be a bad idea..then you can save a little money and not be rushed to find a house. Its a big investment and you want to be sure you have time to make the right decision.

[jimking]

The DC market is really really crazy. The house on my corner went for $40,000.00 more than the asking price.