House!

[firebyrd]

Well, I've just taken the first serious step towards us buying a home. The real estate agent representing the one house we've looked at already naturally was eager to represent us, but I'm not interested in dealing with such a conflict of interest. I found a card for another realtor floating around and called the lady. She was rather huffy, wondering how I got her number (dude, I have your card) and wasn't terribly helpful. She never got back to us as she said she would, and honestly, even if she had, I would have told her to screw it. My mom recommended her hair dresser, who is also a realtor/real estate agent/whatever, so I went ahead and called her today. Wow. Night and day. She was /excited/ to be getting a call from me, took down my information, and told me her broker would be getting in touch with me. He called about an hour later.

Yep, I'm going with her. Someone who actually wants to help me, but given where she normally sells, which is not where we're going to be able to buy, I doubt she'll have any unusual conflicts of interest beyond the fact that the higher the selling price, the more she'll get paid. Unfortunately, that's just a fact of life in Utah, where there really aren't any buyers agents. Since she does the hair of my mom and brother, though, she has a motive to keep me happy.

Now, I've read up a bunch on buying a house, but it is really complex. I'm sure in the future I'll be able to manage on my own, but I just don't feel ready to do it myself yet, especially since we're complicating things by wanting to work with a local program to help people buy homes in our area. It's great, because it gives us a loan that can be used for closing costs and down payments and anything else related to buying the house and is forgiven a bit every year you live in the home until you've been there five years, at which point it is totally forgiven. So if you're willing to stay put for five years, which we are (it's generally not that smart not to stay that long anyway), it's basically free money.

So over the next little while, we'll start looking around, then once Lorelei sells (she's in the shop right now), we'll start hitting things hard. Ideally, I'd like to be in a place in time to plant at least part of a garden this year, though we'll see what happens.

Comments

[darcerin.livejournal.com]

She was *huffy*?! Holy crap, if a potential buyer had called me, I'd be falling all over myself to help them. Utterly ridiculous!

Good luck house hunting!

[firebyrd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was like, "WTH?" I should have just told her to screw it if she was going to have that kind of attitude, but I'm too polite. I'm glad she's never gotten back to us, though.

[seyrah.livejournal.com]

Maybe she's left the business--plenty of realtors have, of late.

But yeah. An active realtor should be practically peeing themselves over a prospective buyer just about now. The one we worked with sent us nigh-daily emails with MLS listings he'd found in our criteria, loaded us with printouts and brochures and free water bottles and drove us around for several days looking at places.

I felt almost bad when we decided to build instead.

[firebyrd.livejournal.com]

Nope, she's definitely active. She told me she would get back to me and have her broker call me, but never did. And the housing market in Utah has never gotten as bad as it has elsewhere, alas.

[randomopera.livejournal.com]

How exciting to be getting ready to get into your own house. That's one of my dreams to be sure!

[saeriellyn.livejournal.com]

Awesome! Congratulations and good hunting!

[firebyrd.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[angelus49.livejournal.com]

We've got to move quick if we want the house we're thinking about, as it will be going up for auction shortly. Like I said in my post, most houses go for over 200,000 in this area, and you're lucky if you can get a 2-3 bedroom, 2 bath and usually around 1400 square feet for that, not the 4 bedroom, 3 bath and 2300 square feet this house is. But this house is in foreclosure, so that's why we can get a deal on it. However, I've found out it has other problems, too--it apparently has the original roof, which needs to be replaced, as well as the standard paint and carpet. Plus, right now the power is off, which leads to there being a possibility of the pipes freezing, which could break them. So yeah, we're looking for less than what they are looking for, but hopefully more than what the house would get if it went up for auction.

It's really neat, though. It's wood and brick, which is unique in an area of mostly vinyl siding. The yard, though--ugh. I think I counted about four kinds of fences in the backyard, the ground is bare underneath one of the trees, and there is a basketball hoop, which will certainly have to go. But I'm all for a fixer-upper, since I want to do a bunch of eco-friendly modifications. I also want to do a garden, but I need to have a decent yard to work with first.

We, however, are forgoing the realtor route. We already found a house we're strongly considering, so a realtor won't do much for us in that respect. And I worked for a realtor for a year, and went through hundreds of files from buyers and sellers, so I have a pretty good idea of what goes on. Doesn't mean it's any less scary :).

As someone who is in a similar boat, good luck!

[firebyrd.livejournal.com]

I did see your post, so I hope things work out for you guys! I've seen one house that could have nice possibilities for us, but I want to keep looking just to be sure. We're not going to find our dream home given the price range we're working with (plus one that could have been just sold in our neighborhood for way out of our range, I'm not expecting to find something I love that much ;), but we can find something that'll work for us for now, which is what we need.