Sunday, May 11, 2008

House hunting is exhausting and way too stressful. After a week of pouring over listings, we narrowed down the hunt to about a dozen houses before we met with our realtor yesterday. She then eliminated about half of those listings because they’re short sales. She said short sales are a waste of a buyer’s time since they can take several months to sort out. So a buyer could put in an offer on a house in short sale, but the seller/bank won’t even touch your paperwork until the short sale is completed. The buyers wait and may lose out on a better house they could have found in the meantime.

That left us with about 6 or 7 houses to look at yesterday. But we only actually looked at 3 because the listing realtors weren’t answering their phones and we couldn’t get the codes to get in to look. That’s a shame, because a couple of them we were really interested in.

Of the three we walked through, there was one that was in excellent condition and ready for immediate move in. However, this is one that is nearing the end of the short sale process, so it could still take some time to complete. And it doesn’t meet all of our requirements in space needs. But it is lovely and definitely moved into the top slot for the day.

The second one is vacant and in pretty good shape, but the kitchen is in need of remodeling and there was an inspection notice by the front door that showed two inspection ratings in the past several months of “poor.” We’re curious what that means. And it’s in a location that would add at least 30 minutes to my already long commute.

The third one I didn’t like at all.

The really disappointing thing is that all of the houses with realty signs in our neighborhood that are in our price range already have contracts on them, including the house next door. Oh, we did look at that one and it’s a disaster. It’s actually in worse shape than the super cheap house we looked at the other night (which has a contact pending already). Beau is very bummed that we lost out on the super cheap house.

On the cute single family house I wanted to look at - we got some intel from a long time resident of our town that that neighborhood isn’t the best. So we didn’t even go look at it or any other houses in that area.

Our realtor has sent a bunch of new listings to look at and I have taken a deeper look at the ones that I ruled out because of their location (mostly because of they would lengthen my commute, not because I didn’t like the house/neighborhood). We’ll see about taking a look at them later this week.