Tell me about buying your first home

In My Humble Opinion
21

  1. What year did you buy your first home? (and which month, if it was recent enough to be affected by current market conditions?)
    12/2001. It’s probably worth about as much as I paid for it now but hopefully that will change eventually.

  2. What type of home was it? (condo/townhome/detached house/other)
    It’s a single family house with a second cabin unit and a bunch of outbuildings.

  3. How big was the living space, and how big was the lot?
    The main house is about 2000’ square feet and the cabin is about 900. The parcel is about 5 acres.

  4. What was the purchase price you paid?
    $420,000 (I live in California so just think of it as foreign currency)

  5. How much money (or what percentage of the sale price, if you prefer) did you save for a downpayment?
    5%

  6. From the time you “officially” began the shopping process, how long did it take before escrow closed on your home?
    About 3 months but there were some problems with the existing tenants that held things up.

  7. Similar to the last question: from the time your offer was accepted on the home you ultimately choose, how long was it until escrow closed? About 2 months because it was delayed for the same reason.

  8. If you hired an agent, how essential do you feel he or she was to the process? Please feel free to elaborate.
    She was absolutely essential because I had no idea what I was doing. She was also an old friend who didn’t take a commission and made up the difference by selling the place that we had been renting.

  9. What would you recommend to others about their first homebuying experience?
    Take your time to find what you want and if it’s an older home make sure that you have an independent inspector go over it very carefully to make sure that there are no hidden problems that could be expensive to fix. And of course, don’t buy a house than you can’t afford.

  10. What would you do differently if you had to do it all over again?**
    Nothing that I can think of.

If there are any other pertinent questions you can think of, please feel free to add them. Thank you.
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22
  1. What year did you buy your first home? (and which month, if it was recent enough to be affected by current market conditions?)

Just closed on it in January 2009.

  1. What type of home was it? (condo/townhome/detached house/other)

Detached house.

I’m going to skip the cost questions.

  1. From the time you “officially” began the shopping process, how long did it take before escrow closed on your home?
  2. Similar to the last question: from the time your offer was accepted on the home you ultimately choose, how long was it until escrow closed?

I started shopping in September 2008 but did not make an offer until November. It was accepted. However, I was the one who requested to close in mid-January because my lease was up March 1; I could have closed earlier.

  1. If you hired an agent, how essential do you feel he or she was to the process? Please feel free to elaborate.

I did not hire an agent in the sense that I did not pay anyone, but I did work with an agent. Two, actually. The first guy was pretty useless and I realized I was doing all of the work, so I asked around and got a reference for another one. She was more helpful and had genuine feedback. Didn’t cost me anything and she ended up giving me some small gifts.

  1. What would you recommend to others about their first homebuying experience?

Remember that the real estate agent is not your friend. Do not tell them what you really think and do not take their advice about making an offer - instead, ask friends and family who’ve purchased a home. In my case, the agent insisted my offer was too low and it would scare off the family. I thought that the house being an estate and being past the end of the buying season (it was snowing) meant I could lowball. I did, and my counteroffer from them was equal to what the agent wanted to make my first offer. It worked out great.

  1. What would you do differently if you had to do it all over again?

Well, I’m bummed I won’t qualify for the new housing credit from the government, otherwise not much. I looked at a ton of houses in more areas than I wanted to live in, and I really worked hard. In the end I bought a house that lacked cosmetic appeal but that I believed was the best investment. We’re fixing it up now (updates mostly) and it’s looking great, plus the inspector told me it’s one of the few houses he’s inspected that he would want to live in. It’s structurally sound and in a desirable neighborhood. Look past shag carpeting and old paint - they’re cheap to replace - and go for the house with the best “bones”.

Oh, and avoid foreclosure houses unless you’re really handy. Every one I saw, and I live in an affluent suburb, was awful and I couldn’t have lived in them without substantial repairs (tubs ripped out, all carpeting and paint destroyed, etc.).

23

1. What year did you buy your first home? (and which month, if it was recent enough to be affected by current marketconditions?
Nov. 1974

2. What type of home was it? (condo/townhome/detached house/other)
Single-family detached

3. How big was the living space, and how big was the lot?
Two-story, 1100 s.f. but not all usable (sloping ceilings), long narrow lot

4. What was the purchase price you paid?
$24,900 (3X my annual income at the time)

5. How much money (or what percentage of the sale price, if you prefer) did you save for a downpayment?
$2500

6. From the time you “officially” began the shopping process, how long did it take before escrow closed on your home?
About 3 months. Looked at something like 40 homes.

7. Similar to the last question: from the time your offer was accepted on the home you ultimately choose, how long was it until escrow closed?
About 6 weeks

8. If you hired an agent, how essential do you feel he or she was to the process? Please feel free to elaborate.
Had an agent, did not hire her. She got her commish from the seller. But I had a RE license at the time. Please note: THE AGENT WORKS FOR THE SELLER, unless you hire a buyer’s agent. In Colorado your agent must make that clear. I don’t know about elsewhere. Under most circumstances, you will need an agent to get inside the homes.

9. What would you recommend to others about their first homebuying experience?
Get an inspection; get a good inspector who knows what s/he’s looking for. Know what you want. Know what’s expensive to fix. If you don’t have enough electrical outlets in a room, for instance–that’s expensive. Unless you’re an electrician. If you don’t have enough water pressure to wash the shampoo out of your hair–that’s expensive (unless you’re a plumber). In some areas termites are a a problem. Expensive. A good inspector can tell you these things, and many others.

10. What would you do differently if you had to do it all over again?
WRT buying, nothing. I unfortunately sold it at the bottom of the market, which if I’d waited ten more months…but who knew?

24

Often both realtors will offer you a free inspection but their motivation is to make the sale happen and not to make sure that you don’t get screwed. Make sure you get your own. I’m not sure what it costs because my partner was qualified to do ours but whatever it is, it’s worth it.

25
  1. What year did you buy your first home? (and which month, if it was recent enough to be affected by current market conditions?)

We bough our first home in September of 2002, before the housing market went nuts.

  1. What type of home was it? (condo/town home/detached house/other)

It was a town home.

  1. How big was the living space, and how big was the lot?

The house itself was 1291 square feet of living space (2 bed, 2 bath with a great room, dining room and kitchen with “eat in” nook). The "lot was the ground that the house sat on plus the rear patio that was fully enclosed. Everything else was community property of the HOA. We sat on a corner so we had a big cornet lot yard- but it just didn’t actually belong to us

  1. What was the purchase price you paid?

$130,000

  1. How much money (or what percentage of the sale price, if you prefer) did you save for a down payment?

We got a FHA first time home buyers program, that allowed us to get in with almost nothing down. We even rolled the closing costs into the loan. We both had really good credit and decent jobs, just no money saved up. IIRC we might have paid 2K upfront, not including the home inspection.

  1. From the time you “officially” began the shopping process, how long did it take before escrow closed on your home?

We just sort of fell into the home purchase. The town home was down the street in the same neighborhood as my husbands brother. We went to go look at it (at my husbands parents request) and we really liked it. So we decided to put an offer on it. I think in all, from offer to close was maybe a month and a half. We had been looking at houses, but not really seriously. We saw this one and said- why not?

  1. Similar to the last question: from the time your offer was accepted on the home you ultimately choose, how long was it until escrow closed?

About 4 weeks. There was some screw up at the title company, and with the mortgage people. They kept forgetting that there were additional forms that needed to be filled out. Morons.

  1. If you hired an agent, how essential do you feel he or she was to the process? Please feel free to elaborate.

We didn’t have an agent on our end. My FIL did real estate with his dad in the 70’s in the Sacramento area, so he really helped us out with everything. (Our second home purchase, we did use an agent- and I’m glad we did)

  1. What would you recommend to others about their first home buying experience?

Don’t buy a house your just “meh” about just so you can buy a house. There has to be something there that makes you say I love this house or I really like the house but this, this and this could be better. It something needs to be remodeled or updated think about the costs that that will involve.

Don’t be afraid to ask a lot of questions to anybody and everybody. Make sure your credit report is in order (so you don’t come across any “surprises”). Make sure you can really afford what your buying- think of utility costs (how much to heat and cool, is there a water bill? etc). Can you handle everything with salary if one of you gets laid off?
10. What would you do differently if you had to do it all over again?

I think I would have wanted to be more enthusiastic about the house. I didn’t love it, but then again we saw it as something we could work with and make it our own. My biggest problem with that is, we have a lot of vision but when it come to actually doing it there is a huge disconnect (time, money, abilties etc). In the end, it all worked out for the best. Now we have 2 houses. we use our first home as a rental property.

26

1. What year did you buy your first home? (and which month, if it was recent enough to be affected by current market conditions?)
2003. Moved in around the start of 2005.

2. What type of home was it? (condo/townhome/detached house/other)
Condo

3. How big was the living space, and how big was the lot?
4 bedroom, 95m[sup]2[/sup]

4. What was the purchase price you paid?
About US$320,000 at the exchange rate at the time.

5. How much money (or what percentage of the sale price, if you prefer) did you save for a downpayment?
There are two sources of housing loans in Japan, government lending agencies and private banks, and most people use a combination of both. The government turned me down because I wasn’t a permanent resident at the time, and the private banks turned me down because I had just undergone cancer treatment that year and was considered a death risk. After several rounds of trying to work out payment terms that they would accept, we finally noticed that we had enough saved to just buy the place outright. So we have our home in the clear and the banks can go fuck themselves.

6. From the time you “officially” began the shopping process, how long did it take before escrow closed on your home?
We signed preliminary papers on the place about 8 months after we started looking. The condo was still in the process of being built (it was finished about 18 months after that preliminary signing), so there was no real rush on either side. The final payment and signing was made about a month before moving in.

8. If you hired an agent, how essential do you feel he or she was to the process? Please feel free to elaborate.
Didn’t use one. Back when I was renting, the majority (about 80%) of realtors I encountered were either utterly useless slugs or racist sacks of shit. Looking for a new condo, we went to the condo developers directly, and every last one of them was falling over themselves to help us out and get our business.

9. What would you recommend to others about their first homebuying experience?
Don’t wait until you absolutely need to find a place, take your time to look at a lot of different places and don’t be afraid to say no. Also, spell out exactly what it is you want and prioritize what factors are important to you; even just doing this for yourself can make things a lot less confusing. Also, think about how neighborhoods will change in the future; when we went to look at our current home, the neighborhood was known to most people as Tokyo’s ghetto (ours was the first of the private condos to go up). Just two years later it was a thriving suburb that condo developers were fighting to get into. Basically, people suddenly noticed that land on the east side of the city, just 15 minutes from Tokyo Station, was available for a fraction of what the more fashionable neighborhoods waaaay out to the west were going for (seriously, I’m a 20 minute train ride from my downtown office. The same size condos 60 minutes to the west were going for over $600,000)
10. What would you do differently if you had to do it all over again?
Not have cancer.

27

1. What year did you buy your first home? (and which month, if it was recent enough to be affected by current market conditions?)
June 2007, when the Toronto market was still red hot.

2. What type of home was it? (condo/townhome/detached house/other)
3 bedroom semi-detached.

3. How big was the living space, and how big was the lot?
The house isn’t huge but has plenty of room for both of us, and the lot is larger than most in the area because we’re on a corner (but still fairly small, since we’re in the city).

4. What was the purchase price you paid?
Mid-$400K range.

5. How much money (or what percentage of the sale price, if you prefer) did you save for a downpayment?
We put down 30%.

6. From the time you “officially” began the shopping process, how long did it take before escrow closed on your home?
About 2.5 months.

7. Similar to the last question: from the time your offer was accepted on the home you ultimately choose, how long was it until escrow closed?
A little under a month.

8. If you hired an agent, how essential do you feel he or she was to the process? Please feel free to elaborate.
The agent was good, though for what he made on his fee, the level of service we got was pretty disappointing. We found the listings and planned itineraries for our visits, but we still felt more comfortable knowing that we could count on his experience in terms of all the paperwork and any pitfalls we might run into.

9. What would you recommend to others about their first homebuying experience?
Get pre-approved for your mortgage, so that you know exactly what you can afford.
Get an inspection up front, or make your offer conditional on a pass from the inspector.
Make sure you like the house, but avoid falling in love… you’re setting yourself up for disappointment (or desperation) if the deal ends up falling through.
Set aside $5000 for surprises the inspector won’t catch (there’s always at least one).

10. What would you do differently if you had to do it all over again?
I’d have waited another six months. In that time, it went from seller’s market to buyer’s market, and the interest rates dropped by over 2%. Hindsight is 20/20, though.

28

1. What year did you buy your first home? (and which month, if it was recent enough to be affected by current market conditions?)

Last June.

2. What type of home was it? (condo/townhome/detached house/other)

Condo

3. How big was the living space, and how big was the lot?

936sq ft, ground floor with some green-space outside

4. What was the purchase price you paid?

$244 000 CDN

5. How much money (or what percentage of the sale price, if you prefer) did you save for a downpayment?

Almost 25%

6. From the time you “officially” began the shopping process, how long did it take before escrow closed on your home?

Contacted a realtor to begin looking in late Feb, took possession in late June

7. Similar to the last question: from the time your offer was accepted on the home you ultimately choose, how long was it until escrow closed?

Made the offer in mid-April, closed late June. The owners were extremely reluctant to drop the price, allowing an extended period for them to find & close on their own place was my biggest bargaining chip in that regard.

8. If you hired an agent, how essential do you feel he or she was to the process? Please feel free to elaborate.

Very. About 10 years ago there was an incredible amount of problems with ‘leaky condos’ being built in the Vancouver area. This often led to expensive or even prohibitive assessments being made to cover the costs of repair to rain-damaged exteriors. We would spend quite a bit of time viewing the exteriors of the buildings, to judge whether the building was a ‘leaky condo’ risk, whether repairs had already been done & to what extent, etc etc.

9. What would you recommend to others about their first homebuying experience?

Trust your instincts. Within a minute or two of being in a place, I knew if it was right for me. The condo I bought was one of the first ones I viewed, and continued to stand out in my mind after I’d viewed 50 other places.

10. What would you do differently if you had to do it all over again?

I wouldn’t wait so long to get my act together to buy. If I’d been in a position to buy 5 years ago I’d have saved a bundle on the purchase price.

29

With a foreclosed house there is going to be defered maintenance. You have to go into it with eyes open. Right now I am in contract for one, it has no heater. I have a $10,000 budget to get the house ready to rent. But my price is $250,000. I have seen houses like this one that need less repair close for $300,00. So for $260,000 and a positive cash flow it is not a bad deal. Yes it will sit empty 1 month while I work and paint.

30

Ditto for rentals. I never saw a single rented unit that I liked, and several were in poor shape despite being 2 or 3 yrs old.

31

1. What year did you buy your first home? (and which month, if it was recent enough to be affected by current market conditions?)

2005

2. What type of home was it? (condo/townhome/detached house/other)

Apartment

3. How big was the living space, and how big was the lot?

85 sq. m.

4. What was the purchase price you paid?

About $240,000 using the exchange rate at the time.

5. How much money (or what percentage of the sale price, if you prefer) did you save for a downpayment?

30%

6. From the time you “officially” began the shopping process, how long did it take before escrow closed on your home?

8 months.

7. Similar to the last question: from the time your offer was accepted on the home you ultimately choose, how long was it until escrow closed?

6 months.

8. If you hired an agent, how essential do you feel he or she was to the process? Please feel free to elaborate.

No agent. Bought directly from the developer.

9. What would you recommend to others about their first homebuying experience?

If it is in a different country from your citizenship, have a good local lawyer.

10. What would you do differently if you had to do it all over again?

Pick a different country.

32

Ooh, yeah. This one. This one a lot. My lender didn’t charge for pre-approval, so I’d go back in every 90 days to get it re-pre-approved.

In the end, it allowed me to get the place I wanted a bit cheaper than I should have because the owners had already bought somewhere and I was the only one who could settle by the necessary time.