Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Taking the plunge

We moved here on August 1st, 2008, having visited prior to that only once as a family to look for a place to live. We did not have long to look and decided it would be best to find a place to rent for our first year while we figured out the area and where we would like to buy a house. Well, the time is upon us to start the house hunt. We have a meeting with the bank tomorrow to figure out what we would be pre-approved at before we start searching, but it's a process that I am viewing with a mix of excitement and dread. Even though it is a good time to buy in terms of prices, we have also heard (from people here in almost our exact situation) that the houses on the market that we would be interested in are mostly being held be people who are not under huge pressure to sell. Those that HAD to sell have already done so at reduced prices and those that can afford to wait for an offer they deem acceptable are now in the majority, leaving either run down places that need a lot of work or houses just out of our range. As if the summer weren't already jammed enough, we will now be searching far and wide for a place to live once our lease runs out Sept. 1. Not sure how this is going to go.

9 comments:

  1. Good luck! If worse comes to worse you can always camp in the lab...

    Wait, isn't that everybody's backup plan?

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  2. Best of luck! House hunting and buying stinks. What a pain. It brings back bad memories of our seller delaying the closing because he needed to BRING 50 grand to get rid of the house we bought. I can only imagine he's been foreclosed on by now.

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  3. Good luck! My brother is also buying. He just had an offer accepted, only to have it fall through due to an unscrupulous agent accepting another (higher) offer before the paperwork was completely filed. Unethical? Yes. Illegal? Yes. Can my brother afford the time/court fees to deal with it. Nope. Ugh! Hopefully you will have a better experience.

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  4. Wow, I feel much better about getting into this now! And if nothing works out at least we'll be able to bath the Wee One in the eye wash station and dry her in the fume hood.

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  5. Never let it be said that the science blogosphere is anything but supportive.

    LOLZ.

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  6. We're in the same boat by the sounds of it. I just have to check with the bank as to whether the economic meltdown has affected their willingness to lend money to aliens such as myself. If they're prepared to show me the money, I think I'm going to be house hunting over the summer.

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  7. Yes, good luck! May you find the home of your dreams!

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  8. Ink, I'll settle for the house not of my nightmares right now. As long as we can find something that we don't have to buy and then sink $30K worth of renos into, that would be fantastic.

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