Our landlord is selling our house. It’s a POS (the city said they’d condemn it if/when we moved out) so we’re sure as hell not buying it. We also don’t like the idea of finding another rental… first off, renting sucks. Second, we have 4 cats and a big dog and it’s hard enough to find rental property here when you just have people…
So who has an extra $150,000 or so to buy me a house? Pretty please?
[$150,000 around here will buy a fairly run down townhouse, built in the 60s or 70s… $200k will get a decent townhouse… you’re looking at $250 before you can get a single family home. sigh)
The places we’ve been scouting out online are way out in the boonies and they’re STILL run down and old.
Ok ok if no one is willing to buy us a house (sheesh!) can someone at least wipe our credit record? You know, so that they don’t start laughing until we at least sit down?
Somebody buy me THIS HOUSE. I wanna be Barnabas Collins!!! Other than that, I ca’n’t help ya, Opal. I don’t know if you can trademark the phrase “3: Hi, Opal”, but you should be getting royalties by the truckload. Good luck, nevertheless…
$250K for a family house is expensive? Just be glad you don’t live in Europe. If you wanted to buy my edge-of-town 3 room apartment in Amsterdam, it would cost you about $180K at least. And I’m sure some of the London dopers can tell even bigger horror stories.
Anyway, good luck on the house hunt. Just offering some positive perspective.
Maybe you can get one of those “Opal’s Kids” jars and leave them around town at certan business establishments.
it sounds a lot like here. You live in SanFran Opal? Just be glad you don’t live in Japan. 150 mill ppl on a mountainous island the size of California! shudder The best place to buy a house. I saw this HUGE house for sale in a nice district in Tucson for $15k. Although it is Arizona and only 1 house but still, OH MY GOD. I can sell my place here and get 13 houses there. Vegas is cheap too.
How well I remember the house hunting. It ain’t easy. When we told the mortgage guy we wanted to stay in the same town because of the schools, and were looking for something around $200K, he said, “Are there any houses there for $200,000?” (This is in a suburb of NYC)
We were able to find one for just a little more than that. It was priced so low because there’s hardly any property. Less than 1/4 acre. Houses start at a quarter million around here, and go up from there. $300K and $350K are not unusual.
But when we saw this house, we knew it was perfect for us. And now, even 18 months after moving in, every once in a while Barb and I just say to each other, “I love this house.”
So good luck, Opal. When the right one comes along, everything will fall into place. That’s my cockeyed optimist viewpoint, anyway.
And, sorry, no, I can’t lend you any money, I got a friggin’ mortgage of my own to pay.
Opal, would this be the first time buying a house? If so, check with your local government to see if they have any benefits for first-time home buyers. I don’t know about Fairfax, but Arlington County has a program which, among other things, will absorb closing costs. Also shop around for mortgage brokers, most have low-downpayment programs for first-time buyers. Angie & I moved into our condo for 3% down; I paid $500 with the balance of the downpayment and closing costs ($5900) coming from one of my sisters. If I had known about Arlington’s first-time buyer program prior to contacting my mortgage broker, I would have gone that route.
We live in Northern VA, just outside Washington DC.
Tucson has great real estate prices (I lived there for 25 years) but everything else about it sucks. I am curious where you saw a “huge house” for 15k though… you sure it wasn’t 115k? When we still lived there we priced houses and a semi-crappy old 3br house was about $40-$50k, while the nicer stuff was $90k up… and the stuff in the foothills was in the hundreds of thousands to the millions.
Have you tried HUD? Or Fannie MAE?
If I was really cleaver you could click on those to link to the gov web sites but I know your better with computers than me so find them youself. Me and Ms. are currently saving to have a decent downpayment so we can buy a house in 3 or 4 years.
I don’t have HUD bookmarked, but I do have bankrate, an aboveboard respected mortgage site, which has a problem credit loan search function. While you may be able to get precleared, problem credit borrowers will often have to identify a property before a lender will commit to doing anything. To find a property, start with the realtors’ nationwide website where you can view all listings in your selected area. Good luck.
Gee. Here in Phoenix, a quarter acre is considered a fairly decent-sized piece of land. People pay premiums to get on big lots like that! Our house is on 6800 square feet.
Our housing prices rock the free world, though - as far as big city housing goes. How does $160K for an attractive, three bedroom house in a nice area of town sound? That’s an average. New construction. Some are a lot less.
OK, jadailey, so you can get houses for a lot less in Phoenix than you can just outside New York City. Problem is, you’re still in Phoenix. ::rimshot::
Maybe it’s not unusual for lots to be that small elsewhere in the country, but believe me, you could throw a bedsheet over my front lawn. I don’t have a side yard on one side because the driveway takes up the whole space, and the backyard is relatively small, too.
On the up side, it hardly takes me any time at all to mow the grass.
The point I was making was that the only way we could afford a house in our target town was to buy one that had almost no property attached to it. And the house isn’t really all that big. The four of us fit into it quite well, but there’s not a lot of extra room, believe me. And it kicks ass compared to the crappy little two-bedroom apartment we were living in before.
Back in the 60’s or 70’s the Whole Earth Catalog published an article by a guy who actually built his dream cabin by writing to friends and relatives offering to pay them $11.50 in the future for a loan of $10.00 now. Some people called him shiftless, but most people donated money and told him to waive the interest, some chipping in with hundreds of dollars.
Sadly, there aren’t 150,000 active members of SD, but in larger amounts that $1 it might actually be doable- and it would guarantee you’d have lots of guests dropping by when they were in the area.
