What would you do? Housing market stress!

[GiaR]

And so it starts, small repeated rate hikes & an end to the Fed’s MBS purchases....

If you still can’t wait to purchase, just be really careful with home inspections when you do buy, especially if the home was sold during 2021-2022. This is/was a perfect time to offload homes with major structural/electrical/etc damage to buyers who wanted a house so badly they skipped inspections. Don't let their buyer’s nightmare become yours.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

In our area they do not expect increase of interest rates to have much if any impact on our seller's market as it was described the lower interest rates were only a piece to the larger puzzle.

Much of impacts of any one thing are going to be market-area dependent. Not everywhere in the country has the same factors going on in their housing market.

 

[BK2014]

My parents always said to buy the worst house in the nicest neighborhood you can afford.

This is exactly what we were luck enough to find. We are buying a new townhouse in a new planned development where most of the homes are single-family homes going for much more than what our townhouse cost. But the townhouse is still a big step up from any of the places we ave rented in the 10 years DW and I have been married.

 

[BK2014]

i dunno. i've heard of far too many sales wherein the appraisal came back far below what the buyer offered yet somehow the buyer manage to miraculously come up with upwards of 50K more in a down payment overnight. seems to me that if i had that kind of change sitting around liquid and accessible i would have planned it into my original down payment (cuz liquid these days sure isn't earning anything sitting in a s/a or m/m account). me thinks there's some just as sketchy financing going on these days as there was back prior to the bubble bust.

I think when buying a house, especially a pre-existing home, people would rather put as little down and save the cash for any unexpected repairs that might come up. When we played around with the math, depending on the total price of the home, an extra $50k down may not make enough of a difference in the mortgage payment to make it worthwhile for some.

 

[BK2014]

The house was appraised and listed for sale for less than that. It is currently a seller's market. It will not permanently be a seller's market. These things fluctuate all the time.

I am only a first time home buyer, so I may be wrong, but isn't the appraisal general done after an offer has been accepted? Not when the sale price is set? According to the realtors we have dealt with, it is not unusual for sellers to price their homes for less than they know they will get just to start a bidding war. But you're right, now that people are accustomed to people paying significantly over asking, buyers are going to feel the need to pay over asking even on fairly priced homes.

 

[MrsCobraBubbles]

I was looking but I had to give up; all the houses in my area go for 10-20% over asking and I just can't afford that! Good luck!

 

[MamaBelle4]

I am only a first time home buyer, so I may be wrong, but isn't the appraisal general done after an offer has been accepted?

I could also be wrong, but I assumed that the seller had an appraisal from his real estate agent, or at least a market comparison done to ensure it was listed for the best price.

 

[barkley]

I think when buying a house, especially a pre-existing home, people would rather put as little down and save the cash for any unexpected repairs that might come up. When we played around with the math, depending on the total price of the home, an extra $50k down may not make enough of a difference in the mortgage payment to make it worthwhile for some.

never personalty had that mindset. always figured that yes, it's important new construction or pre-existing to have a rainy day fund for repairs or such but we always preferred to have a lower payment for the life of the loan just in case something came up that impacted our income. in the case of an extra 50k as a down payment, when we purchased our homes we would have been very happy to have cut our payments by a few hundred a month b/c we could have still paid the higher dollar figure resulting in applying more to the principal but if something came up we had that money available to us on a monthly basis. we essentially did this when we bought our current home-at the time it was less than 1% difference between a 15 and 30 year fixed so we went with the 30 but paid at the 15 year payment figure, and with a few dollars more here and there it resulted in less than a 10 year mortgage overall.

p.s. on a pre-existing home if the seller weren't willing to pay for it, i as the buyer would purchase a whole home warranty for at least the 1st year. on both our new construction we bought them to pick up when the builder's warranty expired.

 

[GiaR]

p.s. on a pre-existing home if the seller weren't willing to pay for it, i as the buyer would purchase a whole home warranty for at least the 1st year. on both our new construction we bought them to pick up when the builder's warranty expired.

Home warranty = artificial sense of security. They are nothing more than a selling-point gimmick to the less-experience homer.

 

[barkley]

Home warranty = artificial sense of security. They are nothing more than a selling-point gimmick to the less-experience homer.

i will disagree based on personal experience. first home we purchased was 30 years old. about a year into ownership the 20 something year old hvac went out. home warranty company dispatched hvac company within a day that diagnosed the problem but replacement parts were no longer being manufactured. this was communicated to home warranty company who in turn dispatched the following day a machinist who examined the system and within a week the hvac company was back with a custom made replacement part. hvac ran perfectly for the remaining years we owned the home. we had other odds and ends of household repairs on that home that the home warranty company never hesitated to timely inspect, repair and pay for.

 

[Hisgirl]

We had a creative realtor contact us. She mailed letters to every homeowner in neighborhoods her clients had interest. "Are you interested in selling your house?"
Actually we were. We reached out and let her know we were indeed going to be selling by owner and would be happy to show the house in a week. I congratulated her for her initiative.

Ask your realtor to do this. There may be folks out there right now about ready to list a for sale by owner. Folks have to be creative in these times.

 

[barkley]

We had a creative realtor contact us. She mailed letters to every homeowner in neighborhoods her clients had interest. "Are you interested in selling your house?"

back during the last big seller's market we would wake up every morning to find stuff on on front porch (lawn ornaments, little decorative flags for whatever was the closest holiday...) with handwritten notes attached, get letters, unsolicited phone calls-all from newer to the game realtors whose clients wanted to buy homes in our neighborhood. we used to say that they must have allot of time on their hands to be engaging in this whereas some of the old established realtors would simply send out a quarterly newsletter that gave stats on area comps, sales trends and their personal sales for the time period. we went with one of the old school realtors after interviewing him as well as some of the newbies. i think the personal contact angle these days is being done via phone and text-i get at least 3 texts per day/2 phone messages (i delete them).