Buying A Home
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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.
Why is buying a home in southern CA IMPOSSIBLE?? Vent
My husband and I started looking for a home to buy three months ago in the OC area of So Cal. The market seems to be so competitive right now because anytime we find anything we like and put in an offer, someone has already beaten us to it and some are even paying all cash! what the heck??? Anything decent in a good school district within our price range is IMPOSSIBLE. We've looked at 20+ homes already and submitted many offers (I honestly lost count). We were able to change our loan status from FHA to conventional with 8% down and this doesn't seem good enough around here. I looked at yet another townhouse today which I am in love with and am getting my hopes up again. This is getting incredibly frustrating.
Re: Why is buying a home in southern CA IMPOSSIBLE?? Vent
It may take more time and alot of patience.
We lived in the SF Bay area when first married and saved for 6 years for a home. We were finally ready to buy and DH was offered an opportunity in the Midwest and we moved. That savings allowed up to buy a nice home with over 40% down and $ for updates and e-fund. We paid that off and bought another house (which took 4 years to find) which is our forever house.
Can you take on additional PT jobs to add to your downpayment?
Sorry to hear about your troubles! It is pretty bad up in the bay area, too -- we spent 5-6 months looking for our place, and that was a very small amount of time compared to many of our friends. I second the advice to increase the DP as much as you can -- we were at 10%, and were told frequently that a seller would take a slightly lower offer with a higher DP.
That being said, our agent told us 1/3 of the transactions out here fall through because of financing. So we put in an official backup offer on a house we were outbid on. Sure enough, the first buyers fell through, and the sellers then acted on their right to enforce the backup contract with us. You should talk to your agent to see if that might be a viable option for you -- though there is some risk involved, because you're basically keeping an option on a contract open for the seller (though you can probably vary the timeframe this is done for). I'm obviously not an expert on the matter -- this is just what worked for us.
Best of luck!