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How long did you look? (House hunting)
DH and I just started our official house hunt this past weekend. We are going to be using a USDA sponsored loan program, since we can't put down a large enough down payment to avoid PMI, and through this program, we won't get charged PMI, but we are restricted to "rural development" areas. Basically it's a win-win for us - no PMI and we can still move to the area of the state we want to live in, so there is no real "down side" to this program. There are plenty of houses in our price range within the USDA's "approved" area; however, many of them are under contract and it seems that houses go into negotiations within days of them being put up for sale.
My question is, if you have a house, how long did you look for it?
Did you have a similar situation as we do (houses getting snatched up really fast)? How did you deal with it?
Any advice for while we're looking?
TIA, ladies!
Re: How long did you look? (House hunting)
Congrats on officially starting the house hunt! Dh and I are about to embark on the journey as well. We're going the FHA loan route, which sounds pretty similar to your USDA loan. Good luck!
I don't really have any advice other than to maybe lurk around over on the Buying A Home board and then posting this over there. They have a lot of really helpful posts and the ladies over there are so nice.
We looked last January for two days, in two suburbs we liked. Then once I found out I had a job, we looked closer to my job. We looked a couple times in August and had it narrowed down to a couple houses, looked again in September once we accepted the offer for the sale of the condo. We looked at like 5 houses on a Thursday night- we really knew what we liked/didn't like by then, and so did our realtor. We had very specific criteria- no water ever in the basement, within one mile of a particular train station, and only needs cosmetic changes right now. Beyond that, we decided to give up a giant master bedroom (with nice bath and walk in closet) for more living space. We then decided that we liked the house we are in now b/c it seems to be located on a more modest street (ie one of the other houses was a cute cape cod, but the house next to it was easily triple the size!).
We put an offer on our house within 4 days of first looking at it. However, the housing situation here seem to be the opposite of yours right now. Ours was empty for nearly a year. One of the other two contenders had been empty for nearly a year and a half. The third was owned by a realtor, we looked at it in August, he took it off the market, and when our realtor called him after labor day, he said "oh, I forgot it was even listed before." We liked that house, a lot! But given that he forgot it was listed, we didn't think he ever would have lowered the price enough to make it more viable for us
Before this- DH looked at 30+ condos 5-6 years ago. He had about 10 that were sold/had contracts on them within an hour of when he looked at them. He eventually knew that when he found one he really liked, he had to just decide on the spot.
We started looking at houses in August of 2009 and found our house in October of 2009. Then the owners refused to negotiate with us (it was overpriced) and so we left it alone and looked at other places. A month later, we had our realtor go back to them and see if they were now willing to negotiate since they had NO offers on it since ours, and they were. Then it took us almost 2 months to close on the house because they were nickle and diming us on things and we coudlnt agree on a lot.
SO it took us some time, but we looked at like 2-300 places probably in that whole span. We did FHA but it was area-limited so I don't have experience with that.
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Thanks for all the input
We will see how this goes....