That’s actually our current thought. It’s clear that the momentum is changing, but there are still enough people (buyers and sellers alike) who are willing to overhype the market for now, and it makes it harder for those of us who want to be sane and/or not get gouged. And with waiting a year, we can be putting money away to make it even easier to afford buying if the prices still aren’t entirely agreeable.
LavenderBlue (and quite a few others in the thread): thankfully, our agent seems to be human. She’s not pressuring us to look outside our price range. She’s finding listings in the cities we want, and cities we haven’t considered that are definitely similar. She’s responsive to our messages and questions, and is quite willing to say “I won’t make promises I can’t keep.” As we’re going on the third week or so, the listings are definitely narrowing in regards to our input. And she’s making helpful suggestions at our viewings. Reminding us to look at the water heater, see if there are stains under the sinks, try the AC, make sure doors are hinged properly. When we were drawing up an offer for the house that fell through, she explained all their standard clauses, even ones that did not even remotely apply to us, in case they would apply on a later listing. I think we have one of the good ones.
Now we just need another house to come on the market worth buying.
I’m sure your house will find you, like ours did. We weren’t ready to buy, but our house was on the market then, and it was the right house for us. Calgary was a hot market even then (2 1/2 years ago, before the lid blew off of real estate here), but our house had stood vacant on the market for a couple of months, and the price had been lowered twice (unusual for this market). I kept seeing the listing on the online real estate, so finally we decided to go check it out and see why it wasn’t moving. It turns out that the house was structurally in great shape, but looked all beat up, so most people couldn’t see past the holey walls and shag carpet to what a great place it was. Jim had been a painter for 7 years - holey walls don’t matter at all to him.
What I’m trying to say is, you’ll find a house that suits you, and you’ll get it.
Only Mostly Dead, I’ve been in your situation. My wife and I bought our rowhouse last year. We started looking in the beginning of January, and we didn’t have an offer accepted until April.
What areas are you looking at in particular?
We started out looking for condos in Arlington and NW DC. At the time, if you wanted to get the house, you would have to put in escalation clauses. I can’t tell you how many places I looked at. I would estimate it to be in excess of 100. The worst one was a supposed 2BR, 1BA in Columbia Heights. The place was an apartment building which had been gutted and renovated.The whole apartment was maybe 710 Sq.Ft. I was horrified when I saw the place and even more horrified to see how many people were at the open house. I overheard the listing agent state that they had run out of contracts. In another place, the basement had electrical wiring hanging all over the place. The house was a mix of ancient outlets with some new ones in place as well.
The most important thing for you to do is to take your time. Don’t rush in to anything. If your instinct tells you that the place isn’t worth it, walk away.
When you get an offer accepted and you are getting ready for settlement is when they will really try to screw you. Ours was a nightmare. The title company tacked on a bunch of fees. Unbeknownst to them, our lender had already given us a pretty good estimate of what the closing costs were going to be two weeks prior so when the title companies estimated closing costs settlement sheet was off by $2,000.00, we were prepared. My wife called them to complain and flat out told them that this was unacceptable. They hemmed and hawed for a bit, but eventually caved and claimed that they had made an error calculating something after my wife told them that we would rather walk from the deal than get screwed like this.
She moved from New York and flew back up this week to close on her condo. She gets to the closing, and everyone’s there, the attorneys, the agents, the buyer…except…where’s the bank?
Her attorney calls the bank and asks them if they’re coming.
“Nope,” they say. “We found out this morning we appraised the wrong property.”
The buyer’s attorney was livid, my co-worker was furious, and her attorney put the blame squarely on the head of the buyer and his reps, since they didn’t check the paperwork. Now, the appraisal has to be rescheduled, the buyer has to pay for everyone’s time, and my co-worker had to sign over a power of attorney to sell her condo, on top of now having to pay both a mortgage AND rent on an apartment down here.
The only advice I didn’t see yet in this thread is to select a good real estate lawyer, and pay him or her well. With housing prices the way they are in most urban areas, your agent will end up making 5 to 10 times as much money as you pay your lawyer, and only have to do half as much work. Your lawyer can also be less biased, since you pay your lawyer if you buy the house or not. This means that, unlike your agent, your lawyer has no motivation to pressure you into accepting a bad or borderline contract.
Of course, there are plenty of great, hard working agents out there who really want to see their clients do well and be protected. When purchasing my condo, my agent was pretty helpful, and it sounds like you have found a really good agent as well.
On not wanting to buy a condo, I have to say that condos really aren’t that bad. While on paper you may not own any property outside the condo, in practice there is often garden space that you are allowed to plant things in and do some landscaping on. You also have free reign to remodel the interior as much as you want. Plus, not having to be responsible for repairs to outer walls or replacing the roof is actually kind of nice. The condo I ended up buying is a “townhouse-style” with two floors and no one above or below, so it really has the feel of a townhouse. Anyway, if you don’t find any townhouses you like, maybe it won’t hurt to expand your search a little.
Despite what you might have heard, Hyattsville is a very pleasant place to live, and real estate is still relatively affordable here. There are also some great real estate agents who work this area. Drop me an email (my addy should be in my profile) if you’d like some more info.
We bought our first home, and everything was easy as pie and went smoothly…unfortunately our closing date was to be Dec 31.
After mid December until mid January, all it takes is one critical person in the long chain of paperwork shufflers to be on vacation, and all of your carefully laid plans and schedule will come crumbling down.
On finding that our mortgage broker, title agent, and inspector all had vacations (with no one to back them up timely) after we had signed our offer, and our paperwork mysteriously stalled and disappeared repeatedly, we panicked.
Through judicious and extravagant use of FedEx, Western Union, bike couriers, and flower deliveries to branch office managers, we managed to squeak in on the afternoon of the 31st, so it ended up rosy. But BEWARE THE HOLIDAY SEASONS!
Wow. I am glad I didn’t read a thread like this last year. I bought a house and closed last July. Smooth sailing all the way. Everyone I dealt with was nice. The sellers went out of their way to help me. When the sellers mail forwarding did not work, I packaged up a weeks worth at a time and mailed it to them. Eventually the USPS got their act together.
This isn’t a bad idea. You would really only need the attorney for the closing in my opinion as the real estate contracts themselves are IMHO fairly straightforward and boilerplate. A friend of mine bought a condo and between getting his offer accepted and the closing, went to a condo board meeting where he discovered that the complex was in some major litigation as a result of some improper installation of the roof when the complex was built. Since the condo developer had built the place using a shell corporation which was naturally insolvent, it looked like the owners were going to have to pay for the roof repairs. He hired a lawyer and wound up paying less for the condo since none of this was disclosed at the time he signed the contract.
I rented a year in Hyattsville after I graduated college, when I was just starting my job. On Queensbury Rd, one of those old houses. And I liked it just fine. But I’m not sure it’s quite where I’d want to stay for a while. I had a few problems with neighborhood punks that soured me on it a little.
So I know Hyattsville firsthand (and even now, living in Laurel, usually go to the PG Plaza Metro Station), and it’s not a bad place. But it seems like a lot of fixer-uppers, and there are definitely some sketchy spots.
Emerald Hawk, the place in the OP that we didn’t get was exactly as you described. Technically a “condo” in that outside maintenance would be handled by the association. But if it has its own doors, its own land, its own roof, it’s a townhouse to me.