More Fun In The Realty Rodeo
I've previously mentioned that my wife and I have recently contracted home-buying fever, an insidious, grass-is-greener-somewhere-else disease that has resulted in long drives and a series of disappointments, some of them with an element of hilarity.
There was the lunchtime jaunt to the hideous country house surrounded by swamp. There was the heartbreak over not being able to swing the trashed repo house that would have been a fantastic home and an even more fantastic investment. There was the overpriced house with the rubber tile floors, rickety upper deck, plethora of wasp nests and tragically conceived layout. The latest home-hunting debacle involved me taking a lunch hour last week, rounding up the family and making a 20-minute drive to what looked on the Internet to be a too-good-to-believe prospect. It appeared to have been on the market only a matter of hours.
We get there, and the proximity of a run-down trailer park immediately took this house off our table. Then, there was the large backyard pond, a fine place for breeding mosquitoes and family tragedies, and the frontyard dirt. An attempt to look in a front window was beaten back by menacing scouts from a hive of bees living somewhere inside a nearby wall.
And, after 30 minutes, we gave up hopes that the realtor would show up to give us a bee-free look at the inside. A subsequent phone call determined that the realtor had simply forgotten the appointment, made a day earlier.
Despite the home's shortcomings, it had a contract on it by the next day. It must have had a great personality.
So goes the Southeast Texas realty derby in these post-hurricane times, when people who lost their homes, whether rented or owned, seem to be on the prowl for fresh residential meat. I'm hearing stories of bidding wars, of properties being snatched off the market in stopwatch time.
It is, without question, a seller's market at this time.
The trouble for those playing the housing shell game is that no one really has to take a contingency, meaning they won't accept a contract based on prospective buyers' ability to sell their current digs. So those who own a house and are looking for something better, or maybe just different, are kind of stuck. Johnny McCheckbook is going to beat you to the offer table.
Folks like us can't buy a house without selling their current house, and yet selling the current house without a contract on a new home puts owners at risk of being homeless and having to either desperately settle on a less-than-desirable house or get into the even more vicious and competitive derby for rental property.
There's nothing like a crazy seller's market to take buyer's fever down a few degrees. I can feel the sweat already.
There was the lunchtime jaunt to the hideous country house surrounded by swamp. There was the heartbreak over not being able to swing the trashed repo house that would have been a fantastic home and an even more fantastic investment. There was the overpriced house with the rubber tile floors, rickety upper deck, plethora of wasp nests and tragically conceived layout. The latest home-hunting debacle involved me taking a lunch hour last week, rounding up the family and making a 20-minute drive to what looked on the Internet to be a too-good-to-believe prospect. It appeared to have been on the market only a matter of hours.
We get there, and the proximity of a run-down trailer park immediately took this house off our table. Then, there was the large backyard pond, a fine place for breeding mosquitoes and family tragedies, and the frontyard dirt. An attempt to look in a front window was beaten back by menacing scouts from a hive of bees living somewhere inside a nearby wall.
And, after 30 minutes, we gave up hopes that the realtor would show up to give us a bee-free look at the inside. A subsequent phone call determined that the realtor had simply forgotten the appointment, made a day earlier.
Despite the home's shortcomings, it had a contract on it by the next day. It must have had a great personality.
So goes the Southeast Texas realty derby in these post-hurricane times, when people who lost their homes, whether rented or owned, seem to be on the prowl for fresh residential meat. I'm hearing stories of bidding wars, of properties being snatched off the market in stopwatch time.
It is, without question, a seller's market at this time.
The trouble for those playing the housing shell game is that no one really has to take a contingency, meaning they won't accept a contract based on prospective buyers' ability to sell their current digs. So those who own a house and are looking for something better, or maybe just different, are kind of stuck. Johnny McCheckbook is going to beat you to the offer table.
Folks like us can't buy a house without selling their current house, and yet selling the current house without a contract on a new home puts owners at risk of being homeless and having to either desperately settle on a less-than-desirable house or get into the even more vicious and competitive derby for rental property.
There's nothing like a crazy seller's market to take buyer's fever down a few degrees. I can feel the sweat already.
posted by Brian Pearson at 11:12 AM
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