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Chiming in that I would love a homeowner's thread. I need a place to complain about wood centipedes and attempting to garden for the first time in my adult life. edit: We got pre-approval before we started seriously looking at houses. It helped us think about how much money we actually had and how much we'd be comfortable spending. And that helped narrow my search parameters on Zillow, which is how I found my house. Dazerbeams fucked around with this message at 04:50 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 04:44
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DIY has a bunch of good homeowner type threads, did anybody mention that yet?
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May 4, 2016 04:47
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I didn't see a thread for general house-owning last I checked. But I also forgot that it existed.
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May 4, 2016 04:56
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If you're at the point where you're getting fined over having a lovely lawn then take care of it and stop worrying over "picky neighbors". It's not their fault your house looks like poo poo.
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May 4, 2016 05:12
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FCKGW posted:If you're at the point where you're getting fined over having a lovely lawn then take care of it and stop worrying over "picky neighbors". It's not their fault your house looks like poo poo. Half the time we were cited was within a week of my mowing the lawn. One year, I took pictures of our lawn as soon as we got the citation in the mail and brought them to court saying "This was what our lawn looked like a day or two after we were fined, and I had mowed it three days before. Please tell me what violates the ordinances because I want to fix it". The police officer just mumbled something about "one of your neighbors complained" but couldn't actually say what plants on our lawn violated it. The judge then basically told us "make sure you don't violate the ordinance" and had us pay the fine, and we never actually got told what part of our yard I had failed to mow/weed  The other half the time, no I don't think they were too picky; we didn't mow often enough and our grass got too high. It happens when you have other things going on in your life, like newborns My point is more that different people apparently have vastly different ideas about what constitutes a "lovely" lawn, per the quoted article. I'm saying I'm hoping we don't end up with neighbors that expect us to do all the things to have a super green picture-perfect lawn. We're content with a reasonably trimmed one, and I don't understand people who obsess over it looking perfect. It's just a lawn, it's not like it actually means anything
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May 4, 2016 05:27
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Cover your lawn with plastic sheeting, dump a few tons of Or if you want it to actually look a little nicer, plant a handful of shrubs or trees or whatever in a few spots and then cover everything else with sheeting and rock/bark/whatever. Unless you have an HOA dictating that you must have a green lawn, your choice is not some binary between a green lawn or a dead lawn.
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May 4, 2016 06:22
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Comedy option: Get elected to your HOA board and make them regret loving with you.
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May 4, 2016 06:35
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Our HOA recently switched to some new management company who instantly sent out letters to everyone that was generically "remember to keep your lawn trimmed, this your first warning". Literally everyone received this letter, even the people with perfectly manicured lawns. They didn't tell anyone that this was basically a form letter that everyone would received, people thought they were being loving targeted directly and apparently the management company was flooded with phone calls from angry homeowners who had never gotten a "warning" in the 20 years that they had lived there. We were a bit busy that week and didn't get around to calling until the end of the week. The person on the other end of the line basically laughed and said "We got a million phone calls about this, we're really sorry, that letter was supposed to go to one house but some idiot sent it to everyone, this will never ever happen again". Personally I've been thinking of extending my fence to enclose my front yard and just converting everything into flower and vegetable gardens. Sell the lawn mower, sell the weed wacker, just plant a variety of pretty and delicious things instead of loving grass, I hate grass so much
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May 4, 2016 09:29
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Leperflesh posted:Anyone contemplating purchasing a house in Portland - or for that matter, anywhere west of the Cascades - should price in a big chunk of money for an earthquake retrofit. On the bright side, there should be affordable real estate in Portland and the coast immediately following Death Quake 2020. Andy Dufresne posted:Maybe it's because I'm drinking, but the more I think about it the "get a pre-approval letter before you shop" advice is probably perpetuated by realtors to make sure they aren't wasting their time. Not that that's a bad thing, I don't think anybody should work for free, but the only 2 people I've ever heard say it are the 2 realtors I've worked with. This is true for the most part. Realtors want to be sure they aren't wasting time with someone who will not be approved for a home, and so that they know what home price range they should be viewing. In hot markets (specifically Portland), there is a benefit to providing the first offer and you need (or should have?) a pre-approval letter to provide with the offer. In a market like Rockford IL, you could probably view a home in January, visit the lender for pre-approval in June, and make an offer in July without a hitch (assuming you didn't have the $20k to buy the house with cash). Magicaljesus fucked around with this message at 12:44 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 12:38
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slap me silly posted:DIY has a bunch of good homeowner type threads, did anybody mention that yet? I've looked there a few times and never find them appropriate for just chatting about minor home owner stuff. We should make a thread and get out of this one imo.
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May 4, 2016 13:14
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Andy Dufresne posted:Maybe it's because I'm drinking, but the more I think about it the "get a pre-approval letter before you shop" advice is probably perpetuated by realtors to make sure they aren't wasting their time. Not that that's a bad thing, I don't think anybody should work for free, but the only 2 people I've ever heard say it are the 2 realtors I've worked with. The way our agent explained it was that, since we're in a stupid ridiculous market and every house is a multi-offer situation, sellers are likely to ditch offers without preapproval to reduce the risk of contracts falling apart in financing, because they can. That makes some sense to me. We did talk to a mortgage broker who had strong opinions to the contrary though.
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May 4, 2016 15:20
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At a minimum, the mortgage broker I talked to told me to get a new letter matching each exact offer so you don't show how much your budget is. It might be worth keeping that info from your agent too if you don't totally trust them, mine encouraged a crazy overbid when she knew my budget and I couldn't tell how much of that was the market and how much was her wanting to guarantee the win.
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May 4, 2016 15:50
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Rurutia posted:I've looked there a few times and never find them appropriate for just chatting about minor home owner stuff. There's a stickied, general fix-it thread in that sub forum that I've asked small homeowner questions about and always gotten a helpful response. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2734407&perpage=40
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May 4, 2016 15:59
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FCKGW posted:There's a stickied, general fix-it thread in that sub forum that I've asked small homeowner questions about and always gotten a helpful response. I've posted there quite a bit for random fix it stuff, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about chatting about random HOA shenanigans, frustrations with yard stuff, random DIY poo poo that went wrong, etc. A cross between BFC and DIY.
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May 4, 2016 16:04
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Andy Dufresne posted:At a minimum, the mortgage broker I talked to told me to get a new letter matching each exact offer so you don't show how much your budget is. It might be worth keeping that info from your agent too if you don't totally trust them, mine encouraged a crazy overbid when she knew my budget and I couldn't tell how much of that was the market and how much was her wanting to guarantee the win. Yeah, we're doing that multiple letter thing. We have shared with our agent but feel pretty good about her (and she's with Redfin, so a high purchase price is not as directly aligned with her interests as it is with traditional agent compensation).
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May 4, 2016 16:11
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Andy Dufresne posted:At a minimum, the mortgage broker I talked to told me to get a new letter matching each exact offer so you don't show how much your budget is. It might be worth keeping that info from your agent too if you don't totally trust them, mine encouraged a crazy overbid when she knew my budget and I couldn't tell how much of that was the market and how much was her wanting to guarantee the win. Can confirm, this is what we did as well. We were pre-approved for something ungodly like $650k, when we only wanted to spend $240-$260k. Each time we made an offer, we had the lender send us a new pre-approved letter with that exact amount, and we never shared our total pre-approval amount with our realtor. Rurutia posted:I've posted there quite a bit for random fix it stuff, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about chatting about random HOA shenanigans, frustrations with yard stuff, random DIY poo poo that went wrong, etc. A cross between BFC and DIY. poo poo, I'd love something like this Omne fucked around with this message at 17:22 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 17:20
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Rurutia posted:I've posted there quite a bit for random fix it stuff, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about chatting about random HOA shenanigans, frustrations with yard stuff, random DIY poo poo that went wrong, etc. A cross between BFC and DIY. Exactly my thoughts. One of the perks of owning a house is that you can bitch about it.
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May 4, 2016 17:31
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Bozart posted:Exactly my thoughts. One of the perks of owning a house is that you can bitch about it. Ok ok ok!
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May 4, 2016 17:56
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I'm in the middle of a negotiation for a house and the seller's agent is trying to get me to waive contingencies. There's only one other offer and I'm pretty sure I have the higher bid, so I'm going to stand my ground. If they do the math in their head and decide that a slightly lower offer with no contingencies is a better deal than a higher offer with contingencies, then I guess they figure the repairs would cost more than the price difference. In that case, I'll be glad I didn't waive the contingencies. I guess it's a win-win? 
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May 4, 2016 19:10
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What contingencies? Sounds like a terrible idea to me!
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May 4, 2016 19:16
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I would absolutely never waive the inspection contingency. Holy loving poo poo, especially if they're asking you to do it, what a blaring siren of a red flag.
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May 4, 2016 19:20
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Honestly, having gone through the house myself with a fairly fine tooth comb, I view it less as a red flag and more of a last minute attempt to use some negotiating power. The house is extremely well maintained based on what I've seen and I don't anticipate anything major coming up in the inspections (though I am not an expert, hence why I am refusing to waive the contingencies). It's a hot market and the price on the house is very good (about $100k below the median in the area, plus this house has a view and huge backyard, which is uncommon in the area), so I can see why they'd ask for it in a negotiation if they think they can get away with it. I also wholeheartedly agree, I would never waive these inspections. Like I said, it's a win-win really, since if they really view these inspections as a material downward driver of the ultimate selling price, I'd rather not play that game at all.
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May 4, 2016 19:26
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There's a reason the house is 100K below everything else in the area, and you need a good inspector to reveal that reason. Don't waive poo poo. You're going from first walkthrough of a house (ever?) to making an offer with no contingencies in 5 days? Take a step back, there will be lots of houses. Also fire your agent and find a better one, but that's probably good advice for anyone with any agent.
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May 4, 2016 19:30
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chupacabraTERROR posted:$100k below the median in the area, plus this house has a view and huge backyard, which is uncommon in the area Yeah at this point I'd be asking what's wrong with the foundation, or is it deep in a flood plain, or what.
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May 4, 2016 19:43
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Pryor on Fire posted:You're going from first walkthrough of a house (ever?) to making an offer with no contingencies in 5 days? Take a step back, there will be lots of houses. I didn't waive the contingencies and at no point did I intend to. I just can understand why a seller's agent would try to get that concession out of buyers in a hot market. And yes, I haven't been viewing or inspecting houses for long in this process but I did grow up in a household that did construction and spent all of my teenage summers running wires in attics, so I feel like I'm more technically inclined than most. Definitely not enough to waive contingencies, like I said. slap me silly posted:Yeah at this point I'd be asking what's wrong with the foundation, or is it deep in a flood plain, or what. Yep, these are excellent questions. The selling agent massively hosed up the marketing, so I think that's why it's gotten so little interest. But yeah, it could be something like this that my untrained eye can't see. We're all on the same page guys, relax.
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May 4, 2016 19:47
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We're chill, we just want the schadenfreude of learning what horrifying thing is broken 
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May 4, 2016 19:52
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Well now you got me thinking about why other people have been bidding so low. If there were massive foundation issues or something, would people really see it in the walkthrough and decline to put in a bid? Basically the marketing for this house went like this. The house showed up on a Thursday on MLS. It hit Redfin on Friday. Showings were from Friday to Sunday, with bids due Tuesday (yesterday). Other houses in the area have been doing the same thing and agents have been shutting down the open house early due to too many offers (which seems nonsensical to me, but whatever). It seems to me that what the selling agent did wrong was post it to Redfin on a Friday, start the showing the same day, and only give people 3 days to view it. Had he posted it earlier in the week on Monday, let the people look at it and build interest, let people rearrange their weekend plans to see it, etc, it seems like it would have gotten a lot more interest. As it was, if you had plans that weekend, you probably said gently caress it and didn't come view the house. The selling agent clearly misjudged how much attention the house would get, and seemingly hosed up the process. That's why I think the under-market offers came in and we are where we are now. The house is definitely not in a flood zone, but it is on a hill, so maybe the foundation idea is spot on. In my viewing I didn't see anything that looked under-maintained, so either they put a lot of lipstick on this pig, or something non-obvious is wrong with it. Or the agent just hosed up and we're going to get a great deal (yeah yeah, famous last words). So basically the entire house is probably on the verge of collapse.
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May 4, 2016 20:00
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Speaking of waived contingencies and bad decisions, my friend, who just bought a house by waiving all contingencies, also let the seller live in it and rent it from him for a few weeks because he wasn't ready to move yet. However, for some reason my friend rented it to the guy for less than the monthly mortgage payment cost, and when the seller moved out, he of course left the place trashed. So much so that my friend had to hire a professional cleaning service. It's like he's purposefully doing everything wrong.
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May 4, 2016 20:04
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chupacabraTERROR posted:Well now you got me thinking about why other people have been bidding so low. If there were massive foundation issues or something, would people really see it in the walkthrough and decline to put in a bid? It's hard to say without knowing your area, but a good agent should be able to talk in detail about every aspect of the house and how it compares to similar ones in the hood, then give you a precise answer as to why nobody is biting this one. There's gotta be something going on if it's literally $100K cheaper than the same house next door and isn't a meth house or a short sale or whatever.
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May 4, 2016 20:19
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The seller's agent isn't just trying to flex negotiating power. That would be a terrible way to do it anyway. Flexing negotiating power would be when the inspection comes back and you ask for them to repair woodrot around a window and they say no. This is just some shady poo poo.
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May 4, 2016 20:22
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Can you explain how it would be a terrible way to flex negotiating power? If I'm a seller's agent, I'm trying to negotiate for anything that involves a)increasing ultimate purchase price (i.e. net of adjustments like requests for repairs), b)speeds up closing or c)reduces the variables that increase the risk of not closing at the agreed purchase price. From the seller's agent's perspective, having a buyer remove contingencies checks all 3 of those boxes, does it not? edit: I'm just trying to say that there are non-shady reasons to ask for this concession from a buyer. In this case, I don't know whether it's shady or not, but I don't think it automatically means that something is shady and the house is hosed because the agent asked for this. moon demon fucked around with this message at 20:47 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 20:45
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Yeah it doesn't seem shady at all to me.
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May 4, 2016 20:47
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Asking anyone to waive contingencies for inspection is stupid, especially when it comes to one of the largest investments of your life. Yes, they're negotiating on the behalf of the buyer. That doesn't mean it's not shady. They're basically opening up Pandora's box and telling you that you should trust them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars and NOTHING in this thread or any experience you've ever heard about buying a house makes alarm bells go off? You can close in the same amount of time contingencies or no. The only thing waiving them would do would make it so you can't back out when you find out that the foundation is made out of pebbles and gum. How much earnest money are they asking for?
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May 4, 2016 20:58
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I just sold my house. I did not even hint at asking the buyer to waive any inspection contingencies even though they wrote the offer so that they could use that one to bail on the flimsiest excuse. They had a sale-of-other-house contingency in there and I did push them to agree to forfeit the earnest money if the sale fell through due to that one.
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May 4, 2016 21:15
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As a buyer I would be willing to waive an inspection contingency. I would do it this way: estimate the cost of bulldozing the entire house and rebuilding it from scratch, on the assumption that it has so many problems that on inspection it would be condemned. Add in the cost of renting an apartment and a storage unit for a year, to cover the time it will take to bulldoze and rebuild the property. Subtract that dollar amount from the supposed market value of the house if it had zero problems. That is my zero-contigency offer. And it's only that much because I recognize the worst-case scenario isn't the most likely one, so I am balancing risk against the fact that if I had to bulldoze and rebuild a property, the cost of the new home plus my rent and storage would not be all of my costs, so I'm actually offering the seller a risk premium! Flippers and cash buyers often waive contingencies. But they have the advantage of (typically, if they're not idiots) spreading their risk across multiple properties. The occasional worst-case scenario home is mitigated by the more common case of a mildly distressed home on which they can make a fat profit with some reno, or a nice long-term income by renting the place. As a single home buyer, you cannot spread that risk, and so should only waive your inspection contingency if you can actually afford to restore the property regardless of its possible condition.
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May 4, 2016 21:33
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Also flippers are often used to covering up all kinds of terrible poo poo with new drywall and some granite counters anyway, they won't really care about underlying issues. Source: http://www.hoodwinkedhouse.com . For anyone who hasn't read it, start at the beginning, it's a doozy.
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May 4, 2016 21:59
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Nail Rat posted:Also flippers are often used to covering up all kinds of terrible poo poo with new drywall and some granite counters anyway, they won't really care about underlying issues. Source: http://www.hoodwinkedhouse.com . For anyone who hasn't read it, start at the beginning, it's a doozy.
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May 4, 2016 22:54
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Apropos of this discussion, it seems like sellers these days are absolutely desperate to sell as fast as loving possible. In a sellers' market, they want to list the home, take offers for two or three days, and then stop taking offers. They'll accept a cash offer tens of thousands of dollars less than a financed offer, just because the financed offer will take longer to close and there's a nonzero risk of financing falling through. They want a zero contingency offer and will take less money to get it, not necessarily because there's problems, but just because the buyer can't use a contingency to potentially back out of the sale. I get wanting to get through the process in a reasonable time frame, but I don't get giving up tens of thousands of dollars just to make a sale take one month instead of two. If you offered to pay me, say, $20k to spend an extra month feeling stressed out and having to deal with some poo poo, I'd probably be happy to go for it! I especially don't understand the super-short bid timeframes. Surely, surely, you get the best price by giving as many bidders as possible an opportunity to bid? Why would you deliberately make it hard for buyers to participate in what is essentially an auction? If I list the house on Thursday and have 12 bids by Sunday, holding off for another week might get me 20 more bids. That's 20 more chances at getting more money! What is that extra week really costing you? I think the motivation from the realtor's perspective is to just make more sales per month, I get that. But as a seller I'd be pretty unsympathetic to that argument if it's costing me tens of thousands of dollars.
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May 4, 2016 23:02
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People are by and large huge loving morons and are under the impression that realtors are there to help them. They follow their advice because they're viewed as the experts and unless you spend a significant portion of your time discussing it with other people online, you wouldn't know otherwise. If you try googling anything related to real estate, your results are filled with articles written by realtors and lenders reaffirming what the realtor said in the first place. Do Never Trust Anyone
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May 4, 2016 23:11
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Update on my offer shenanigans: As I suspected, we had the higher offer. However, for reasons unknown, the sellers decided they liked the other bidders better and basically exclusively negotiated with them, not us. Which makes no sense, since wouldn't you negotiate with the lower bid first, then use their concessions as leverage on the higher bid? People here are weird and/or incompetent. In any case, the seller's idiotic negotiation maneuverings don't bode well for their ability to maintain a house. Anyway, the other bidder did in fact waive their inspection contingencies, thereby saving me from buying a house that most assuredly is on the verge of imminent collapse. Another day, another disaster avoided.
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May 5, 2016 01:13
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