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I do home equity loans and refinances of firsts for one of Wells Fargo's competitors, and our occupancy and use statement says that you must pay the note off in full before permanently changing the use of the property. I always tell my clients that there is a hell of a lot of wiggle room with the word "permanently."
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Oct 23, 2012 04:55
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Maybe this isn't the right place, but it's the closest I could find... Are there any general guidelines for how much you should spend to renovate a kitchen based the value of the home? I've seen a lot of variation in answers in other places. If it helps, our house is probably worth about what we paid for it ($95,000) and we plan on selling in 2 years or so. Our kitchen is workable, but could use some upgrades. I don't expect our renovation to add a lot of value to the house because of other issues - only one bathroom, no garage, etc - but it will probably help it sell faster when the time comes.
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Oct 23, 2012 22:48
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What kind of upgrades are you thinking about? I wouldn't put a solid surface counter top, or solid wood cabinets in a 95K house. You'll never get your money back out of them. Keep an eye on bang for the buck. New hardware and paint/stain on the existing cabinets... maybe new doors if they're in rough condition. New laminate counter tops, maybe a nice sink. A reasonable tile floor would be nice if your rocking the linoleum. Don't get crazy.
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Oct 23, 2012 23:09
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My head still spins when people talk about their 150,000 or 90,000 houses. It's like a combination of disbelief, jealousy, and vertigo.
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Oct 23, 2012 23:46
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I paid about 160K for my house here in San Antonio. I have a co-worker in San Jose who paid over 600K for a smaller house that was almost 50 years old and needed tons of work. I know the Bay Area is hot, but drat, that's insane.
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Oct 23, 2012 23:48
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Baronjutter posted:My head still spins when people talk about their 150,000 or 90,000 houses. It's like a combination of disbelief, jealousy, and vertigo. When I want to annoy my west coast friends I post local real estate ads like "How much did you pay for your house? Because here's the literal mansion you could get for that here." (I live in Austin and while the market is rising, it's still miles below California).
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Oct 24, 2012 00:10
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skipdogg posted:I paid about 160K for my house here in San Antonio. I have a co-worker in San Jose who paid over 600K for a smaller house that was almost 50 years old and needed tons of work. You could probably buy a parking spot for the 60k i paid for my house.
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Oct 24, 2012 00:30
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Dr. Kyle Farnsworth posted:When I want to annoy my west coast friends I post local real estate ads like "How much did you pay for your house? Because here's the literal mansion you could get for that here." (I live in Austin and while the market is rising, it's still miles below California). It's sure annoying but to be fair, I'd rather pay $650k for a 2300 SF house on a 10k SF lot in San Diego than $300k for a 3400 SF house on 2 acres in Texas. Southern California isn't perfect by any stretch but there's no humidity, no bugs, no snow and other than LA traffic isn't bad. When I moved here 11 years ago I couldn't believe the pieces of poo poo that were selling for $300k. Now those pieces of poo poo seem like a bargain. If I couldn't afford the house I'm in now I wouldn't have bought anything - there just isn't any value in a house under $500k here. The toughest part about living in SoCal is that in most states I could afford for my wife to be a stay at home mother. In San Diego I need her income to help pay the mortgage. Not to be smug but I think I bought at the right time (December 2012). I just got an appraisal to do a re-fi and it appraised $30k higher than the purchase price. I feel really lucky - I have a lot of friends who are under water and dealing with 8% loans with no hope of ever re-financing. I've already made a handful of bucks and am getting ready to re-finance at 3.5%. Timing is everything. Slappy Pappy fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Oct 24, 2012 |
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Oct 24, 2012 00:56
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$600k can get you one hell of a McMansion here in New England
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Oct 24, 2012 00:59
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Spamtron7000 posted:Not to be smug but I think I bought at the right time (December 2012). Please share the plans for your time machine!
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Oct 24, 2012 01:04
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Leperflesh posted:Please share the plans for your time machine! Oh poo poo I am not good at calendars. 2011
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Oct 24, 2012 01:27
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skipdogg posted:What kind of upgrades are you thinking about? I wouldn't put a solid surface counter top, or solid wood cabinets in a 95K house. You'll never get your money back out of them. Keep an eye on bang for the buck. New hardware and paint/stain on the existing cabinets... maybe new doors if they're in rough condition. New laminate counter tops, maybe a nice sink. A reasonable tile floor would be nice if your rocking the linoleum. Don't get crazy. I forget where I saw it, but somewhere on the internet there's a list of "best bang for buck" renovations you can do. Surprisingly, the best return on your renovation expense is buying a new front door made out of steel. It's like a 150% return or something ridiculous. A new front door I guess is like the easiest way to literally boost curb appeal. It's a literal first impression of security, newness, quality, heft, etc. Don't just renovate your kitchen just because you hear it's a good idea. Take a look at your house as a whole and ask yourself what the major sticking points are. It might be the $5k-$15k you'd spend on a new kitchen won't go as far as putting down $500 worth of carpet in the living room, or repainting the exterior trim over a weekend with some friends for $200 of paint and $40 worth of pizza. A good listing agent will tell you what's sticking out too, but it sounds like you're not quite at that stage.
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Oct 24, 2012 02:45
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To be fair it sounds like he wants to renovate the kitchen so the kitchen is better for him, not for resale value.
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Oct 24, 2012 02:54
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Realtor thoughts: Would it be better to go with the guy who's straightforward, no-bull, 'I work to get you the best price', or with someone who's a bit chattier, has a solid reputation and history, and is more interested in getting you into the 'right' place? Keep in mind that it's not like we need somebody to show us good neighborhoods/locations; there are a grand total of about 100 houses on the MLS here in all price ranges (about 10% are foreclosures we're not likely to end up in, 10% are way too expensive, and the rest are within our range). Fun fact: the nicest foreclosed house here cost over $500k to construct and went over budget so early the owner made the contractor skimp on ground prep, meaning the house is sinking into a peat bog that used to be on site. Edit: Assume all realtors we talk to have a good history, but the chattier ones seem to have been at it longer.
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Oct 24, 2012 03:36
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FISHMANPET posted:To be fair it sounds like he wants to renovate the kitchen so the kitchen is better for him, not for resale value. Yeah, this is right. We really just want to fix a few things that bug me (as the primary kitchen user): new countertop - there's a crappy laminate thing in there now - new sink with disposal, and new backsplash. The issue we're having is whether putting in these new things is going to make our crappy cabinets look even crappier in comparison, our cracked tile floor look even crackier, and then it kind of snowballs from there. As for the cheap house price, the trade-off is that you have to live in Northern Indiana.
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Oct 24, 2012 13:15
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Advent Horizon posted:Would it be better to go with the guy who's straightforward, no-bull, 'I work to get you the best price', or with someone who's a bit chattier, has a solid reputation and history, and is more interested in getting you into the 'right' place? Pick whichever suits your own personality best. Buyer's agents aren't that critical, especially if you already know the houses and neighborhoods you're interested in.
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Oct 24, 2012 13:49
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Baronjutter posted:My head still spins when people talk about their 150,000 or 90,000 houses. It's like a combination of disbelief, jealousy, and vertigo. The ones that get me are the renovation threads by Kastein and Pyre, IIRC each of them got theirs for ~$15,000 or thereabouts. Downsides? Both houses were dumps, up in the North in unpopulated areas; I think Pyre is in Michigan and Kastein's in maybe upstake New York or western Mass? The idea of a house, in any condition that's not condemned, costing less than an average new car just blows my mind.
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Oct 24, 2012 14:32
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I put down less at closing on our house than I have as down payment on a car before (to be fair, this is only counting the money I brought that day, not our earnest money, and all our closing costs were paid). It felt really weird. The movers move our heavy crap tomorrow, but we've already moved the kitchen and whatnot. Alarm installed, upgraded myself to a Nest thermostat, wife painted an accent wall. I am ready for home ownership (ie, something that somehow all the inspectors and appraisers missed that will cost thousands to fix)
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Oct 24, 2012 14:52
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Dogen posted:The movers move our heavy crap tomorrow, but we've already moved the kitchen and whatnot. Alarm installed, upgraded myself to a Nest thermostat, wife painted an accent wall. I am ready for home ownership (ie, something that somehow all the inspectors and appraisers missed that will cost thousands to fix) How do you like the thermostat? They look really cool, but every hardware store display I've seen has been broken. At least four of them.
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Oct 24, 2012 15:19
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cornface posted:How do you like the thermostat? They look really cool, but every hardware store display I've seen has been broken. At least four of them.
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Oct 24, 2012 17:20
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newts posted:Maybe this isn't the right place, but it's the closest I could find... This is something a good seller's agent should be able to help you with. While it can be difficult to predict the market conditions even 2 years in the future, there are tools and processes to identify how much specific improvements to a home will increase the value of that home compared to similar properties in the neighborhood. One mistake that many people make is assuming there is a general, set dollar value that maps -cost of improvement- to -increase in sales price-. This is not actually the case. In reality, it's entirely situational, not just to the property and improvement, but to the buyer you are attempting to target with your home and marketing. Consider that any improvement you make to your home is actually a form of marketing. If I could spend $100,000 to market my product and then I sold it for $50,000, that would be a terrible investment. Likewise, if I marketed my product for $1,000, and sold it for $15,000, that would be a fantastic ROI. Home marketing and improvement is similar, but you also have the overall price of the home to consider. If my house is "worth" $100,000, and I can make a 1k improvement to sell the same house for $115,000, that is a great investment - especially if it will help attract buyers that would not have been interested in the house at all without the improvement. On the other hand, making a $10,000 improvement that lets me sell the house for $120,000 makes no sense at all if I have the previous option available - I'm getting an additional 5k in revenue, but losing 9k more in costs. You can over-improve a home, and end up eating the cost and sometimes even scaring away potential qualified buyers. Another important consideration is: who is most likely to want to buy your house? Who does it appeal to the most? And what improvements can you make to the home to appeal specifically to these buyer profiles, because if your home is going to attract single male fishermen who love the stock pond and don't care about cooking banquet meals, then a major kitchen revamp may be the wrong place to spend your money when you could be improving the landscaping and view and installing a better pier. The long and short of this is that you want to work with an agent that is an expert property marketer to help you conduct not just a standard Comparative Market Analysis but also to create things such as detailed buyer profiles and cost-benefit projections for specific improvements. Your home doesn't have a "set price": it has a sliding scale of value that can be adjusted through smart marketing - just don't throw money at it randomly. Does that make sense? Sorry if it was super-wordy. Advent Horizon posted:Realtor thoughts: You should go with someone who shows proper business acumen and who is going to get you the best deal in negotiations! The other things are nice and all but whoever you choose is in charge of lots and lots of money. A lot of people don't realize that your Realtor has a significant hand in how well-off you end up at the negotiating table, based on how well they do their job. This is something I always stress - make sure to consider the finances first and foremost, communication second, and personality a distant third when you are making a choice of Realtors. Just because you have a limited supply of homes does not mean an agent can't negotiate the homes you like from a position of strength. I'd be happy to go on and on about this and talk a bit about HOW a good agent can get you better houses for less money, but that's probably better saved for PMs or e-mail (I do agent-client matchmaking for a living and I'm already being preachy enough) It is certainly less important with a buyer's agent to have the MOST AMAZING AGENT EVER but it is definitely possible to make a huge difference and since you aren't paying anything typically for your buyer's agent, it makes no sense at all not to get the absolute best service you can. The idea of getting the "right place" without it being at the right price is bizarre, to me, and vice versa. I Love You! fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Oct 24, 2012 |
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Oct 24, 2012 18:34
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cornface posted:How do you like the thermostat? They look really cool, but every hardware store display I've seen has been broken. At least four of them. It does indeed look really cool and all the reviews I've read (a lot) have been positive on the build quality. My suspicion is that the ones in stores are suffering from children loving with them. I have yet to hook it up to the internet or get into a daily routine with it as we haven't even quite moved in yet, but I can attest to the fact that is easy to set up. I am looking forward to being able to adjust the temperature from bed using my iphone.
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Oct 24, 2012 20:09
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Considering that this will be, by a factor of like 100, the most expensive thing we've ever purchased, I'm willing to hear any freaking advice I can get! Edit: Dammit, that was aimed at I Love You! On a side note, so far it seems like the female agents speak more to me, the male speak evenly to us. Kind of weird.
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Oct 24, 2012 20:12
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Just put in our first offer at 15% over list on a house with a 30k pest inspection... And we were still third out of 11 offers... Feeling like we're going to be quickly priced out of anywhere in the Bay Area that doesn't have bars on the windows.
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Oct 25, 2012 23:08
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Thaumaturgic posted:Just put in our first offer at 15% over list on a house with a 30k pest inspection... And we were still third out of 11 offers... Wow. Different market than Vermont entirely. We just bought our house for 20% UNDER list and we were the only offer.
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Oct 26, 2012 00:45
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We're doing our last Realtor interview tonight and we'll make our decision either tonight or in the morning. There are several open houses tomorrow, a couple for houses we might be interested in. Would it be bad to go to the open houses if we haven't signed anything with our chosen realtor yet?
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Oct 26, 2012 20:12
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Thaumaturgic posted:Just put in our first offer at 15% over list on a house with a 30k pest inspection... And we were still third out of 11 offers... What's your price range? There are many lower-cost parts of the bay area that aren't window-bar shitholes. I bought in Concord, for example: there are still lots of sub-200K houses here in nice, reasonably safe neighborhoods. Advent Horizon posted:Would it be bad to go to the open houses if we haven't signed anything with our chosen realtor yet? Not at all. My wife and I looked at houses for over a month before we got our realtor. If you find one that you're interested in, you can mention it to the realtor when you pick him or her, and he or she will be able to show it to you again and/or contact the seller for more details. Obviously you won't be in a position to make an offer before you get a realtor, but I personally think "looking at tons of houses" should be a requirement for anyone shopping for houses. You learn how to look for the details you care about, and spot problems, mostly through experience. It's like... practice, you know? If you want to be good a thing, you have to practice it. So it follows that if you want to be good at picking a great house, you should get lots of practice at looking at, and critiquing honestly, houses of the type you're considering. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Oct 26, 2012 |
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Oct 26, 2012 20:15
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Advent Horizon posted:We're doing our last Realtor interview tonight and we'll make our decision either tonight or in the morning. I wouldn't sign anything with a realtor. If I were house hunting I'd go look at a half dozen open houses every weekend whether I had an agent or not. If you find one you're seriously interested in, take your realtor back for a second look to make sure you didn't miss anything then put in your offer.
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Oct 26, 2012 20:43
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Pweller posted:I wouldn't sign anything with a realtor. Signing a contract with a Realtor as a buyer CAN be a good thing depending on what you're looking for your realtor to do. For example, if someone has a rep agreement with me, I'm going to spend extra time generating price comparisons, searching for more targeted comparable properties and lots, investigating comparable neighborhoods and making calls on the client's behalf. It really just depends. There are situations where having an exclusive contract in place is not desirable, but it's by no means universal and if you find GOOD representation early on it can be quite helpful, especially if you're a first-time buyer and can use the extra assistance and communication. Also, when house hunting, having a realtor you're already working with that knows you and your needs well can help identify and alert you to much more relevant properties as opposed to the shotgunning that normally takes place. If you're looking to find good listings fast instead of drawing out the process, it can be genuinely useful.
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Oct 26, 2012 21:36
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Pweller posted:I wouldn't sign anything with a realtor. There are, for instance, disclosure forms that are required by law here. If you're going to be using a Realtor, there will be paperwork first. Every one we talked to also had it noted that their agreements are not time limited and either party may terminate the relationship. Also, we often don't even have half a dozen open houses on a given weekend and most of the open houses are lovely condos (we have a glut of lovely condos, it's the one thing there appears to be plenty of). If there's even one house on a given weekend that we might be interested in, that's freaking amazing.
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Oct 26, 2012 22:15
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skipdogg posted:I paid about 160K for my house here in San Antonio. I have a co-worker in San Jose who paid over 600K for a smaller house that was almost 50 years old and needed tons of work. My wife and I found a great home in San Jose that was listed at $468k, we put our bid in last week at 500k and got rejected. The accepted offer was over 530k. We're probably going to bump our range up to 600k soon, but it's ridiculous how much fuckers are overpaying.  Off to a bunch of open houses this weekend. This sucks.
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Oct 26, 2012 22:23
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I Love You! posted:For example, if someone has a rep agreement with me, I'm going to spend extra time generating price comparisons, searching for more targeted comparable properties and lots, investigating comparable neighborhoods and making calls on the client's behalf. Serious question what percent of a realtor's time would you say is spent working with people that never close a house with that realtor? Honestly I think the 6% cartel fees should be a thing of the past considering all the information that is available via the internet today. However, I also realize that when you close you are in effect "subsidizing" all those that look, but never buy (ie those clients that you don't get you paid). It will be interesting to see what happens as the generation that grew up without the internet stops buying homes as they get older and the internet is used more by more people buying homes.
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Oct 26, 2012 22:38
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Haydez posted:My wife and I found a great home in San Jose that was listed at $468k, we put our bid in last week at 500k and got rejected. The accepted offer was over 530k. In all fairness, you are clearly looking at the upper half of the market. Ref: http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/California/San_Jose-heat_map/ There are plenty of houses listing in the sub-400k range. I suspect you've got requirements for neighborhood, size, or quality that are bumping you into a higher price range. The Central San Jose median price (sales) for Oct 17th is $403k.
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Oct 26, 2012 23:05
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If that has town homes, condos or "mobile homes" on it - that's out of our criteria. Only looking for SFHs with no hoa. And the south eastern areas on the map are a no go too. I meant more the San Jose area and going up the peninsula a little bit. The one we lost a bid on was a 3bed/2bath and under 1100sqft. I wish that map reflected my conditions
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Oct 26, 2012 23:20
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Yeah. Santa Clara, Cupertino, Sunnyvale... you're looking at more expensive areas than "San Jose" all by itself necessarily implies. I think median family home price indexes like this include townhomes and condos, but probably not trailers/mobile homes. Not sure exactly. Zillow lets you filter by home type though and that chart suggests the San Jose median for single-family dwellings is up to $563k, which is surprising to me. All I can say is: I urge you not to overspend. It is easy under these conditions to get caught up in the bidding-war mentality and end up spending more than you should. Be patient, give it a few months. But if you're really priced out of the market you're looking in... admit it to yourselves and change your plans. That means either compromising on how much house you can buy, or compromising on where you are shopping. Either option is far better than impoverishing yourself with a debt you can't comfortably handle. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Oct 26, 2012 |
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Oct 26, 2012 23:27
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San Jose is nuts. We bought a 1000 sq ft townhouse in a highly desired complex with a superb HOA for asking price ($419K) back in March and we only got it because our realtor got the seller's agent and seller to look at and accept our offer before the open house. There were 10 more offers at higher amounts after it. It was on the market for about eight hours. You really don't want to live where anything below about $350K is here, either.
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Oct 26, 2012 23:31
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Realjones posted:Serious question what percent of a realtor's time would you say is spent working with people that never close a house with that realtor? The time % depends on how bigshot the agent is. An established agent often has a team of scrubs and office staff to help out with the "maybes" and just takes care of the "sure things" himself. With a buyer's agent, the % is bigger than with a seller for sure. "Buyer" is a term that should always have quotations because goddamn, you see a lot of people who clearly have no business or intent to buy. Most Realtors are terrible and probably don't deserve their 3% commission. A good Realtor should net you much more than a 3% increase in net profit from a house OR should at least be helping you sell the house much, much quicker than a For Sale By Owner. I work for a specialty brokerage where our target numbers are 5%-15% more money on average for a home sold through us than by an average agent off the street. But we also sit through 10-20 hours of training a month re: home marketing and have a dedicated office team to perform many of the 70+ items in our marketing plan. While these kinds of target numbers are not always met, they are achievable, but it's definitely a matter of aggressive marketing, which most agents don't and can't do. Much of a good plan involves actually identifying specific buyer profiles and making/highlighting small improvements that can be made to a home to appeal to those specific profiles, then marketing the property appropriately, and a large percentage of Realtors aren't equipped to make these sorts of recommendations. A large percentage of agents will just put up a sign and slap a house on the MLS - you should not be working with these people. They generally are not very concerned with the final sales price of the home because it will probably eventually sell, anyway. If an agent isn't actively working to get you the top dollar for your house, you should not be using him/her. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, it can be hard to find someone in your area that is much better. There are challenges, legal and practical, to For Sale By Owners, but they can be overcome if you do your diligence. The biggest issue is qualifying and screening potential buyers - it is significantly more common for a contract to fall apart when it comes time to close because the buyer was not really qualified. That's probably the most common pitfall to watch out for. The other main issue is that FSBOs typically take longer to sell as you're fighting over a much smaller pool of potential buyers. Otherwise they can be fine. As a Buyer, however, you usually are going to want an agent, if only because you aren't typically paying their bill (unless you buy a FSBO and a few other specific circumstances) and they're actively involved in trying to help you get the best deal. Most clients are happy with their buyer's agent because there's really no point in the agent NOT trying to make the client as happy as possible barring extreme apathy. I Love You! fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Oct 26, 2012 |
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Oct 26, 2012 23:33
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He's pretty clearly asking about buyer's agents, though.
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Oct 26, 2012 23:42
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Leperflesh posted:He's pretty clearly asking about buyer's agents, though. I was adding that part in, but you beat me to it. Since the buyer isn't paying the fees for a buyer's agent typically, it's usually to their benefit to have SOMEONE with expertise fighting on their side in the negotiation process.
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Oct 26, 2012 23:47
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As a buyer I still wouldn't ever sign anything with a realtor since they're straight up not necessary. Literally the only advantages are: 1) access to automated mailing of details about homes on the market that fit your criteria (5 minutes of work on the realtor's part- but sure it costs them $$$ to have access to, etc) 2) a level of removal in the negotiation process when your offer comes up for negotiation (hard nosed realtor is good here, but they still should essentially be acting as a messenger) There are so many scrub realtors that I honestly think it's too hard to find and recognize ones that aren't, who can offer legitimate advice that acts as a mini home inspection and where homes will realistically have a good chance of retaining value. It's probably different in other areas, but I would also like to keep my self open to sales by owner or comfree which your realtor will likely be actively ignoring for you.
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Oct 26, 2012 23:51
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