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

[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.