Seattle Nesties
1st year anniversary in Victoria with a killer whale topiary!
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Clicky for homeowners: Househunting
W and I are just now starting to look at houses ... with any luck we'll buy during the first half of this year. We did some poking around on Redfin & Estately but I have no clue how much we should narrow things down before we start going on actual tours. So a poll for those who have done this song and dance before.
[Poll]
[Poll]
1st year anniversary in Victoria with a killer whale topiary!
Re: Clicky for homeowners: Househunting
For my first home, it took me about 6 months of looking before I found something I liked and then I made an offer that was declined. The second house went much better and was only a few months later.
I knew I wanted to live in Seattle and preferred north of downtown but west of I-5 and south of where I was at the time 85th. and that narrowed my home search significantly.
The second home, it took us 1.5 years to find something we both liked in a price range we both liked and location even though I feel I compromised a lot on location. I was looking pretty specifically in a few neighborhoods: Queen Anne, Magnolia, Madrona, Ravenna, and Hawthorne Hills.
My tactic the second time around was going to as many open houses on my own and discovering what I really could not live with out and what I really could. Then I'd loop D in and he'd have the final say on yes or no after I'd whittled down my list.
There was one home that we /really/ wanted to buy in Magnolia. 3.5k sqft, <5 year old construction for less than 500k which is a steal (we assume it was some sort of short sale that wasn't listed as a short sale). We planned to go to the Sunday Open House two days after it went on the market, but the day of the open house someone already went to see it on Saturday with their agent and put in an offer and the open house was canceled. (So if you see something you might really like, contact your agent THEN and see it as soon as possible.)
The market is still /really/ hot for good houses at a good price. A lot of what's on RedFin now (I still look just for fun) is stale for Seattle at least and if a house hasn't moved for a few weeks it's generally for a good reason.
We didn't look at too many.... My husband just said "I like that one, lets buy it" so we did.
I highly recommend using redfin as your agent. They were fantastic and you get 1.5% back at closing.
This haha.
We're in the midst of house hunting right now.
Our agent sent us a full list of everything that was in our price/size/location ranges etc. so H and I looked through those and narrowed it down to I think 5 houses that we were actually serious about looking at. Then we picked a day/time and went out for a few hours and looked at those five.
We fell in love with a short sale that we actually put an offer in on a few months ago, but their lien holders came back with an offer 25k over what was on the table (which was 10k over what we've been pre-approved for), so our agent told them that was really the best we could do (especially because the house did need the bathroom to be redone immediately because the bathtub was cracked), so that's over.
Now we started the process over, and we're actually going out tomorrow to look at 6 more (so actually I guess my clicky answer was wrong
) I'm actually super excited because there are a couple we're going to look at that I (on paper) like a lot more than the one we had the offer in on 
That's something else that I've learned - those little blurbs and some good pictures can make anything look good. There was a house that was perfect for location and size and everything, but when we went to look at it - O.M.G. The roof was missing over the kitchen, and the ceiling there was so full of water and mold that our agent almost immediately had to step out because he was having such a severe allergic reaction, and it was bowed down so far *I* could touch it. Oh, and someone had rammed the side of the house with a car. And there had been a grow-op in the living room hahahahahaha.
Anyways, it's a funny story now
, but at the time I was super disappointed. The big thing I've learned in the few months we've been on this journey is that you don't want to get attached until you have the keys in your hand.
♥ bfp1 06/14/2011 ♥ edd 02/22/2012 ♥
♥ baby jennlin born on 02/15/2012 ♥
who says you can only wear your wedding dress once?
honeymoon bio ♥ married bio ♥ planning bio
jumped ship to the new and improved nest. back to TB for baby boards.
We just went through the process of buying our first house in September. We narrowed our search to a a few zip codes and got daily emails from Redfin. If you see something you really like you can't hesitate. Work with an agent that lives near your desired area. Our agent wouldn't even show us short sales. You can make an offer and then waste six months waiting for the bank to turn it down. Yes, they are great deals but it can lead to a lot of wasted time.
The house we ended up in was one my mom saw through Windermere email. She called me at work and we were looking at it with our agent by noon. Made an offer that day. People jump on stuff so quickly. My husband and I spent a lot of time driving through neighborhoods and peeking in backyards/windows (of the empty ones) to get a feel for the neighborhood we liked the best.
I wonder if the ladies on here will agree with me that it's kind of like shopping for your wedding dress. When you find the right one you just know.
Best of luck in your search!
We had a similar experience to the bold above. We found two different houses that looked perfect online. But when we finally went inside, the first one had nothing in the kitchen, I mean nothing - not even the pipes for the sink. The previous owners had ripped everything out and left huge holes in the walls. The upstairs bathroom had flooded into the downstairs and they hadn't even bothered to finish tearing out the moldy insulation before they left. There were lots of other things wrong, but those were the main things. Another house showed a beautiful living room, at least on one side of the room! The other side was missing most of the middle of one wall, had insulation half ripped out and blue colored doggie paint foot prints all over the floor, along with no ceiling straight into the roof.
Don't fall in love with anything online. We ended up buying a house we never saw online.
We looked at a few when we were officially looking, but I'd been to plenty of open houses in the previous few years when I was just interested and wanted to see what was out there. Many were during the housing bubble, and I had to make myself stop because I'd get so sad believing we'd never be able to enter the housing market in our neighborhood (West Seattle). I was not willing to buy a condo or townhouse, and definitely not willing to live outside Seattle proper.
We ended up seriously looking last spring, when the owner of the condo we had been renting decided to sell. Prices were finally down in our range, and in the parts of WS in which we hoped to buy. We looked at three houses that weren't quite right for various reasons. On Memorial Day evening, a new listing came up that looked promising. We saw it with our agent the next day and had an offer submitted by Thursday AM. The following Monday we signed off on the seller's counter-offer. The market for good houses is definitely competitive. Our seller's agent put up a sold sign the same day our inspection contingency was met (one week after contract signed) because she'd been getting so much interest in the listing.
There will definitely be more listings in a couple months. Springtime is when many people list their houses. That said, if you find a "stale" listing you like, you can probably get a good deal.
We definitely did extensive online shopping before going in person. We ended up falling in love with a house that we didn't give a lot of credit to from the website representation, though -- it was a short sale that was still under construction!
Our Realtor suggested we go and check it out anyway, and it turned out to be the perfect house for us. And since we put in our offer before it was done, we got to choose a lot of things for how it was finished -- like the appliances and the carpet.
Which is good; the appliances the builder wanted to put in were both more expensive and less suited to the house than the ones we picked. :P (Seriously -- the entire kitchen is in warm golds/golden browns/black, and they wanted to put stainless steel in? Ew. We went with black. :P) We also got to pick out the carpet, which was ALSO really good; the carpet the builder wanted to use was this unholy lovechild of shag and pubic hair. We went with something a bit more conventional.
Anyway, the short sale process was fine -- the bank approved it almost immediately (we lowballed the number they were asking for, too) -- and we love this house.
We don't ever want to move again, if we're given the choice!