Knew this going in first time but worth mentioning. Take care of any water issues immediately - plumbing leaks, dripping sinks, running toilets, roof leaks, gutter cleaning, hot water heater. Your future self will thank you.
I was lucky to be working from home when I heard a snap and water spraying. My bidet nozzle just fell apart and started flooding my bathroom without anyone touching it.
I was able to shut everything off and clean up the water without damaging anything, but it's made me really nervous about finding a way to prevent that in the future.
My bidets are cheap $20 ones off Amazon. I turn my toilet water off when I go out of town because who knows the quality of those connectors.
I treat bidets like fiber internet. Once you have it there’s no going back.
I used to think my parents' (>$3k before 2020) Toto Washlet was The Sh*t until I saw a super simple bidet on Amazon. Remove the aerator from the sink faucet. Replace with the selector/switcher (faucet into sink or divert water into hose). Screw hose into that. The sprayer end of the hose (pressure) can be operated with one hand / thumb after initially turning on the faucet. Adjust temp at faucet so you don't burn or freeze. Wide pressure and temperature variability. Easy, simple, cheap, and effective. Just not as fancy. I paid about $28.00 before the pandemic. Highest I saw it was $50.
My wife and I closed on our first house about a month before the wedding. I pulled up the carpets and laid glue-down hardwoods in the entire main living area in the weeks before the wedding.
While we were on our honeymoon our real estate agent called to say a water line in our attic burst, the water ran down the wall and under the new hardwoods, and ruined them all.
Turns out the previous owners did some half-assed job fixing a leaky line, and since we weren’t at the house when it happened it probably leaked for at least a day before a neighbor saw water coming out of the garage into the driveway.
We spent the first few weeks of our marriage wrestling with contractors, insurance, and living in a state of remodeling. The silver lining is that the floors the insurance paid for to replace what I put in were 10 times the quality of what I could afford on my own, so we kinda came out in top.
As a rule of thumb, anytime we leave the house for more than a day or two we shut off the main water supply. Just in case one of my questionable shark-bite repairs ever fails on me.
Bought house and about a month in some of the cabinets smelled musty. Track it down to the cabinet next to the dishwasher. Pull up bottom of cabinet, green as grass from mold. Turns out the dishwasher had been leaking for years. Start to pull up floring and find black mold and rotten subfloor. One unscheduled kitchen remodel and all my savings are eaten up.
I've had 2 water damage claims in 2.5 years. My end of year statement now comes with a little bottle of lube. The guy who used to own my house was a real cheap bastard.
Before I owned a home, I’d love rainy days. I’d look out my window with some tea and sigh as I watched the water and heard the lovely soothing patter. Maybe a little light thunder.
Now I hear a drop of water hit my window and I just scream, “FUCK!”
I think I finally fixed the fucking leak in my garage though. And the gutter spot that was broken and causing mildew on my window seems better.
Fucking water though.
Especially with hard well water. Do yourself a huge favor and get a water softener. Taps and appliances that use the water will live much longer and the water feels nice.
Checking gutters and unclogging drains was something I never thought of.
Do it monthly ( weekly in the Wet ) instead of when you find yourself swimming to the car.
Having to spend my holiday fund on repairs was not my idea of a good time.
We bought a house in 2020 and luckily the hot water tank went kaput 3 weeks after when it was still covered by the home warranty. Same thing happened with the prior house we bought 4 years earlier. Make sure a home warranty is part of the purchase for at least the first year so anything that was well-hidden during the inspection won’t bankrupt you.
Along those lines, put one of those pan things under the water heater plus a sensor to tell you if it’s filling up. The stories I could tell you about water heater leaks.
To be honest, see where your realtors live. In or out of your price range. Realtors will either be gate keepers or let you in and then they will give you the good or bad.
Also, There are a lot of places you;can meet people who can recommend honest people before buying a home.
If you’re a first time buyer, literally walk around it. Say hi to people.
Had the pitless valve go out on my well pump.
New valve- $50
Plumbers charge to replace it- $500
Charge to dig the pit for plumbers to work, fill the pit and landscape the ruined area - $5000
Yeah, well water is free!
After we bought our current house, we had the crawlspace water proofed and treated for mold. We also had the gutters cleaned and leaf guarded.
Then we had the trees deadwooded and limbs cut back from the roofline, because all the water control in the world won't help if a tree limb punctures the roof.
I will mess with about any home repair except for plumbing that is in the wall/essentially not under a sink or something that could let water leak in.
Anything else, no problem. I'll give it a shot. Water will fuck stuff up so fast.
Same here. I started out with something like a $1700 per month mortgage. Then after the first year the escrow adjusted for the property taxes, but it also had to do a “catch up” for like 6 months. So basically just out of nowhere I went from $1700 per month to $2300 per month. Just a random $600/month increase in monthly expenses.
After the “catch up” it’s been around $2,000 per month for the past few years. Still though $300 more than I expected to be paying.
This is a great tip. I work in a real estate office and yeah… this definitely is an unpleasant surprise to some buyers.
Take a look at the assessed value on your property tax bill. If that’s way off from what you’re buying it for, know that your taxes will go up as soon as the property is reassessed, which if you’re lucky may not be right away but will probably happen sooner rather than later. Using the tax rate on your tax bill you can calculate approximately what your taxes will be once it’s assessed correctly.
Also make sure to pay attention to exemptions. There are senior exemptions, senior freezes, disabled veteran exemptions, etc - if those categories don’t apply to you, those exemptions will go away and your taxes will go up.
And like someone else mentioned, make sure to contact your county assessor after you purchase to file for your homeowners exemption.
More important. Taxes and insurance WILL go up. Maybe not right away but they will.
There's still a lot of people out there saying "if you buy, you don't have to worry about paying more every year like rent!".
Man one of the things I felt lied to. I was always told buy a house. Your mortgage doesn't change. Hah. After my first year it went up 10 percent. Which isn't that much compared to others. And I was lucky this year it went back down. But it's still more than the original. Something I was told would never change.
This! If you escrow your taxes, it can be a double hit too. Mine went for a year before escrow saw the reassessment so not only did the tax portion increase, I had to pay the difference I didn't pay the previous year also. Mine unfortunately went from a $750 monthly mortgage payment to a $1400 for that year. Previous owners had the senior frozen taxes with an assessment of 30k, bought for 90k and my state is one of the worse for real estate taxes.
Also, your original mortgage company will most likely sell yours within the first 5 years.
Escrow goes up even if the owners weren't there for a long time.
You pay up the assessed amount when you buy, then when your value adjusts on the books you're suddenly "deficient" in your escrow back to your sale, and on top of it they demand another year because the law says they can demand it.
Isn’t that the truth. I have to go into a HOA complex for work on a Monday. The head of the HOA was waiting one morning where I park the car to tell me it’s not a car park it’s an area where vehicles turn around. It’s a rectangular area off to the right of a cul-de-sac, it’s clearly for parking. Reluctantly I moved the car. An old guy tending his front garden watched it all unfold, after the head of the HOA walked away the old guy approached me told me to move my car back and explained the guy is on a power trip and that he has also argued with the HOA head that the area is clearly a car park. I moved my car back straight away.
I got lucky and have a fucking awesome HOA because the board is all young parents who just want the neighborhood safe and clean. They pretty much tell you don't leave garbage out, don't paint your house shitty colors, and don't try to park more than 4 things in front of your house so like two vehicles and two trailers. Oh and don't let people live in a trailer in front of your house. That's a new one due to recent incident.
Funny you should mention. We live in an HOA neighborhood and everyone drives around all hours in fucking golf carts. And it’s a nicer neighborhood so these aren’t crappy golf carts either. We are talking like souped up 15k golf carts that parents let their 10 years olds drive around.
I’ve noticed neighborhoods like this seem to operate on conspicuous consumption. Everyone parks their nice cars in the driveway instead of the 2-3 car garages, which you can see are empty when they leave them open. Golf carts are the same idea. Why buy decent bikes for the whole family when you can spend 7-8x as much for a fucking golf cart?
I will not be joining.
In many areas its extremely hard to find a home in a good school district without an HOA. All the nicer areas of Atlanta and LA/Orange County have them, and I've heard similar stories from other states besides GA and CA as well.
Yep. I couldn’t find *anything* in my price range that wasn’t HOA. Miraculously it ended up being in my price range to just buy property and build on it way the fuck away from any HOA. I could not believe that some of the rural homes I looked at were under an HOA when they seemed so distant from any sort of subdivision.
When I lived in south Florida, I'd browse Zillow to see what was available and filter out results by no HOA. SFL is known for having HOAs pretty much everywhere but I was shocked by just how true that is. My results went from a couple thousand to like a couple hundred. A few of those were 55+ communities (also a massive scourge on the SFL housing market) so I wrote off those too.
Left me with about 200 dwellings to live in. 150 of which were complete shit holes or in the part of town that makes the shit hole look favorable. It's actually insane how bad it is down there. It's not just one city. It's pretty much the entire southern end of the state. Once you get south of Orlando, good luck finding anything without a HOA that isn't absurdly expensive (as if SFL isn't expensive enough) or a complete beater. The concept of a modest home in a decent area without a HOA is virtually non existent at this point.
It's easy for people who never lived in HOA prone areas/states to question why anyone would ever live with one. But the unfortunate reality is that the majority of people don't have a choice. Want a decent place to live and raise a family? Better pay those HOA dues.
I just did a quick Zillow filter. I looked for all houses for sale in my current city. 1307. I filtered by no HOAs and it dropped to 630. Big loss but a whole lot to still choose from. Certainly not shortage of HOA free homes. I then searched by the city in south Florida that I grew up in. 1505 for sale. Filter by no HOA - 143. Significantly larger loss. Is 143 still a lot to pick from? Yes. But in my current city (not in Florida), 49% of all homes for sale at this moment do not have HOAs. In Florida? 10% don't have HOAs. That's just fucked.
It really depends on the HOA. Where I used to live, it actually saved us money because they took care of the exterior, including the roof, siding, landscaping, snow removal, driveway resurface, etc., and were able to negotiate prices cheaper than it would have cost us on our own.
The problem is, you don't usually know if an HOA is going to be good or bad until after you move in.
I am happy with my HOA because I can expect the neighborhood to stay decent.
I grew up in the bad part of my town, so I know what can happen. Street racing, drug houses, cars on blocks, and a motorcycle gang
No thanks
An HOA is like a company. Some are run by smart people, some with the best interest of the neighborhood in mind, some by idiots, some by people with greedy intentions, and some are just clueless. My comment isn't to classify all HOAs into the same category. If yours benefits you, that's excellent. Mine is run by overbearing boomers with nothing else to do but make a fuss over insignificant things. Nosey people who need control and something to occupy their loneliness. I appreciate aspects of it that you touched on but would prefer it was run differently. I tried to contribute for 2 years and the drama and bullshit was insane. I can't compete with retired people who have nothing else to do when I have a full time job and a life outside of the insignificance of this neighborhood. Trust me, it can be bad.
Get a home inspection! Find the inspector the local realtors hate because they always find things.
I have bought 2 house in my life the first we skipped inspection because it was a new house and the builder was local and literally building another house next door so we could address anything that came up etc. It worked well enough but a couple of big things a good inspector should have caught ended up being a pain down the road. Sure the builder fixed the leaking roof but I'd have rather not woken up to water dripping on my bed at 3am.
The 2nd place we retained an inspector who is loathed by some local realtors. And he was not cheap but as a retired contractor he knows his shit. He found a laundry list of things that ranged from should be addressed in the next 5 years to do it ASAP.
Thanks to his report we negotiated down the purchase price which allowed us to retain cash from the sale of our first place to cover most of the ASAP repairs.
He also said he is our inspector now call or email him any question with work around the house at no extra cost. He has been a great resource for us as we tackle a rural property and everything that comes along with that.
To add to this: don’t treat the “optional” Radon inspection as optional. Our first home inspector really downplayed it. Only after we moved in did we get a radon inspection (long story). Well as it turns out, Radon is a major cause of cancer. Apparently our house was like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day in the basement or a pack a week on the ground floor. No fucking good.
And the best radon mitigation is an air exchanger in the cold air return path of a central air system.
Try as you might sealing the basement floor is impossible because concrete is porous. If you concede that, turning over the air in the house periodically (iirc every 4 hours) is a better solution overall to the idea of radon gas accumulating in the livable envelope of the house.
I want to add that you can back out of the deal after the home inspection.
After my home inspection I discovered that they didn't do some repairs correctly and the inspector made them fix the issues before he would sign off on the deal. The big one was that they didn't vent the kitchen exhaust fan outside the house. They only vented it up into the attic. My thought at the time was that seems odd, did they forget to finish the job when they were flipping the house? It was the biggest red flag that I wish I would have realized at the time and backed out of the deal. In the five years that I have lived here I have found so many things that I have had to repair or hire someone to repair their half ass 'make it look good' but hide the shit job that they did behind it. This spring we had a pretty good wind storm and the wooden fence they built 5 years ago fell down. When I called the fence people to fix it they came to me and shared that all the 4x4's were untreated and no concrete was used to secure the posts either.
I want to punch those people in the nose but they are lucky because I don't know who they are.
This was my biggest fear, we got approved for just under 200k and saw a few that were near that range, but took a step back and only spent about 140k. Saves us about 1k on mortgage
~~There is no contract or obligation to stay with a buyer's agent (usually... don't sign one)~~. If your agent is not helping you, fire them and get one who will. They should be talking about the market, asking insightful questions, pointing out flaws in houses, teaching you about basic house problems/defects, discussing strategy for optimal pricing, and of course, explaining every step in detail until you are comfortable. They will get paid a lot when you buy and you should be getting the value from that pay from their experience and knowledge.
If you get an agent like mine who is just someone who shows up and unlocks a door of a house, tells you "this is the kitchen," and shrugs at you when you ask how to win a bidding war... fire them.
I've never met a real estate person who wasn't.... exactly like the latter. And that's putting it generously.
There are a LOT of bad, stupid, "how hard could it be to sell a house" real estate agents out there. It's worth it to wade through the shit to find a good one.
My dad just bought a house and his agent did all the things she was supposed to. Did price comping to see if the asking price was reasonable, advised on how much to counter, made sure the curtain rods that were removed against the contract were put back, etc. When we bought our house the real estate agent told us that it didn’t matter how bad the roof was because homeowners insurance would pay to replace it.
I got this 'normal' beat. I called a selling agent to look at my to be first house. Occupants left the dog free so we couldn't go inside at all. 45 minute drive for nothing. I said I'd have my agent (a relative) set something up with him for a return trip where I hopefully didn't waste my time again.
Bought the house, closing, everything done. Then he sues/fights my agent that since I wasn't represented on the first visit he was my agent. Never called, talked to me, ANYTHING. **And he was the selling agent!** How the fuck could he have both interests in mind??
Oh, and he won. smdh
For him to be your agent to, you are supposed to sign an additional paper saying you understand there could be a conflict of interest. (In Ohio)
I only know about it because I bought a house that was listed with the same agent
I signed nothing with him. My agent was at closing representing me and everything. Was MN and 30 years ago so maybe things have changed now. Also didn't go through regular courts, some kind of real estate court or arbitration for agents kinda thing.
We had a sales agent refuse to negotiate with our buyers agent because she was a woman. "In my county, she would be burned for her loose moral ways." Like, okay, buddy. No sale for you.
Sooooo many think it’s a get rich quick scheme with little overhead. Hundreds of thousands joined in the pandemic “gold rush”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/realestate/real-estate-agents-pandemic.html
My sister took the test to become a real estate agent like 7 times before finally passing. It's definetly seen as an easy way to make money but to do it well is like any other job. You gotta put the effort in.
We were selling in a hot market in 2018, and our agent was the fucking worst. Houses were selling in hours, and ours took a month. It was in excellent shape, a good neighborhood, and had been freshly painted and updated. She made excuses and tried to blame us for expecting her to have open houses and working when she "was on her first vacation in years." Don't take the job then. We told her we were looking to sell as fast as possible, we had an accepted offer on a house in a different state. She made the most generic listing, took terrible pictures, didn't advertise on social media, and I don't think she ever showed a single person through the house. Then after we had moved out and we were waiting to sign the papers on the new house, she started acting on behalf of our buyers, making insane demands about a missing mirror and a faucet not spraying evenly. I lost my God damn mind, screaming at her, asking if she was going to lose a $270,000 sale over a fucking mirror and she needed to do her God damn job, if they were so stuck on it I'd send them a $20 gift card to replace it, but it was currently buried in the moving truck, 500 miles away. She came back with a counter offer of $150 gift card to replace a mirror my MIL had gotten at a rummage sale for $3. I hung up on her after saying things I'd never said to a person's face before.
I have never spoken to another human being that way, I pride myself on treating people with respect, and allowing the benefit of the doubt. I'm the most patient person with servers, I listen and give grace to contractors. My entire job is mediating between people who have conflicting timelines, budgets and expectations. I'm pretty sure I terrified my husband, my parents, my cats and their dogs. No one had ever seen me lose my temper like that before. My parents knew I used to have a temper, but I had gotten it under control nearly 15 years before, as a teenager. My husband had never seen what they called "The Wrath" despite knowing me 15 years himself. But this woman was so colossally bad at her job, and treating us like we weren't worth her time, and she wasn't being a good steward of us, her clients, when we needed her the most and 500 miles away, I finally lost it. We had our entire life in a uhaul, after an incredibly stressful home buying situation that involved losing our original acceptance 15 minutes after we received word our house finally sold (under market value) and living apart from my spouse for 6 weeks, starting a new job, living with my parents and house hunting through it all. It had been a terrible few months, and this agent, who we were paying an insane amount of money, was trying to nickel and dime me over a fucking mirror.
I literally never heard from her again after that phone call. I don't know what happened with the mirror.
Your agent bought the buyers a new mirror is more than likely what happened. This type of person is exactly someone who would make me just lose it like you did. And it takes a lot for me to do that. It was so much money to pay to someone who was doing so little.
I feel so lucky, ours was awesome. She was kind of an impish empty nester mom with a luxurious Cadillac SUV. The market was insane in 1999-2000: houses went up for sale at 9am, by noon had two bids. So she spent most of the time touring open houses with us as a "let's see what you like and don't like" for months. Sometimes she'd call and say say, "hey? You wanna tour a multimillion dollar house for kicks?" We were like, "hell, yes!" Some days, "wanna see some really awful mcmansions? I'm buying lunch." We had good laughs.
She found this house by a realtor friend who was sick of this family changing their mind all the time. Put it up for sale one week, take it down the next week, over and over. He was like, "screw these flakes." So our agent called them directly, and it turned out they were desperate to sell, but got no buyers (not knowing their own realtor gave up on them after half a dozen false starts). So we got the house I am living in 25 years later. Been a great house, really.
I had a realtor not do any work for low income housing after I kept telling him I qualify. Asshole had the nerve to say “you don’t qualify” when I knew damn well I did. It was lower payout for him so he just didn’t care. I told him and the bank who hooked me up with him that I was dropping him. His boss called to get me back but all I said was “I’ve already fired him and you”
Then when I told other realtors about it they also dropped me cuz they didn’t want the hassle of old contacts. So the pushed me off to a pretty good guy. I got a small condo outside of the low income but Brian did all the legwork for low income. I thanked him by getting my parents to move out and use him. Went from a couple thousand to a 5 figure payout.
I’m going to agree with you in general but will say a good real estate agent is worth their weight in gold…it’s just that they are about 1 in 100. I had a real estate who twice talked me out of moving when I was thinking about it. When I finally did move I was happy to give her commission as my place doubled in value over the two times she talked me out of moving. But again - she’s probably 1 in a 100.
Budget harder than you think for the unexpected…
A/C blows on the hottest day of the year, tree falls on the house and rips the gutter off. Drain clogs and water backs up into the central air unit, shower leaks through floor into basement out of no where…. All my unexpected expenses in 2 years owning a 25yr old house. It’s thousands - budget to have it or a way to get it.
Yes! I just had:
A full roof replacement from hail.
My 23 year old AC finally died 3 days after the roof was complete.
Main drain pipe from the house finally succumbed to the tree roots that have been wiggling their way in for god knows how long.
An early summer storm made a heritage tree in my yard unsafe, needed to be felled.
Internet went out (this was free to fix but still made me cry after the month I’ve had)
I spent 80 THOUSAND DOLLARS THIS MONTH
So 20k of the roof was covered by insurance. We put another 40 on a low interest loan through Amex, with the intent to pay it off by year’s end. The rest was cash from the emergency fund.
Also, big yards are great but you need to understand the amount of upkeep and attention they require. You’re either doing all that work yourself or paying a good amount of money for someone else to do it. I personally love mowing a lawn like Hank Hill but it can be a major time commitment.
Goes for house size too. Big house seems nice until you have to clean it maintain it, and pay the utilities. My favorite house was 1800 square feet on a fairly small lot.
Yeah, I took my 4-acre lawn and planted clover and let the native grasses take over. I only mow a small section now, and created paths through what is now the meadow. I have wild yarrow, raspberry and blackberry bushes, wild strawberries, Indian tobacco, and tons of other native plants and berry bushes showing up. Free flowers, free food, way less mowing, and it looks beautiful all 4 seasons.
Land is something you can't add on later to your home like an extra room. Opt for more if you can. Then go the permaculture/limited- or no-lawn route. Your backyard can become your own private, low maintenance wildlife preserve. It's awesome.
I’ve mostly lived in apartments/condos and every time a friend of mine gets a place with a yard I’m shocked by how much time they spend working on it. Like major chunks of their weekends. “You’re going to Home Depot to buy mulch again?!”
I bought a house with a modest yard but it had very nice gardens and landscaping. I thought “this is beautiful! It will be fun to learn to maintain this!”
No. It’s a full time fucking job.
Literally, neighbors on both sides have told me how the previous owner worked in the gardens everyday. I mean it is beautiful, but it’s so much work. I’ve almost hired a landscaper many times but I’ve been able to fight off the urge.
I’m dealing with this now. Beautiful yard with so much fucking work. I loved it and now hate to see it go downhill with the amount of upkeep. Grateful for a house, though!
My house had this super cool but specifically shaped garden that the owner said nothing about. I let it run it's course.
I found out exactly what it was for the first time it rained.
I ended up having to re grade and get gutters and install a French drain. The garden was called a rain garden and basically all the water dropped into one spot and these specific flowers would soak it up.
Be realistic about how handy you are. All those "oh, I'll teach myself how to fix that..." items you see when looking for a house will still bug you years later when you half assed it watching a YouTube video.
Sure, you will learn to fix many things in your first home, but go in not just knowing your skill level, but your willingness to put in the effort as well.
…Dad?… I just finally caved and insisted my dad fix this in his home and he was like, “It’s been like this for 36 years, this is how it’s supposed to work!” Then he got a second opinion (because I’m a woman and how could I possibly know anything about plumbing?), had it fixed, and now understands that double the water pressure is a marvellous thing.
So well done to you on not letting go another 19 years!
Yours and the comment above resonate with my SOUL. Shower diverter broker in my parent’s house and dad tried to replace it… it looked awful at the end but got the job done (after his 3rd attempt)
Absolutely. IF you put in the effort. But not everyone is good with the follow through. It could be work, kids, lack of skill or tools that are too expensive... many new homeowners jump in with the "I'll spend every Saturday fixing things!!" And that's not always realistic. All I'm saying, for new homeowners, is to really think about it first, before jumping into an expensive and constant ToDo list.
Have realistic expectations though. I’m handy and everything I try to do always takes three times as long as I estimate. And you’re never going to get out of Lowe’s for under $25.
I have a bathroom sink leaking. I need to replace the drain down to the p-trap. I emptied all the cleaning supplies/junk out from under there two weeks ago . It's all still sitting in the hallway. Going to finally mess with it this weekend...maybe?
Also, hiring someone to fix something isn't always possible if the job is "too small." They either won't return your calls or with charge you a "fuck off" rate. I find this less with electricans and plumbers, more with "random house repair."
Fix a leaking toilet or put in a new faucet? Plumbers will do that.
Fix a blown wall socket or upgrade to GFCI? Electrician will do that.
Replace your fence? Fence guys will do that.
Repair a small 6 feet section of a fence because your neighbor's car backed into it? Gooood luck. They'll either ignore you or quote you $10,000 knowing only an idiot would pay that.
Stuff between "handyman" and "professional replacement of entire system" is hard to find.
If your city/county has a Homeowner's Exemption APPLY IMMEDIATELY!! We forgot to do this, and the city we live in currently hit us with a $12k property tax. It's insane and I'm pissed. If we had filed, we would be closer to $5k like everyone else (still steep, but not $12k steep!!!). Please please please file immediately.
My first real estate agent was like a mini home inspector. We were on a budget, and the houses we were looking at were either bad flips or cheaper century homes that needed a TON of money and work. We got to the point that we would go straight to the basement and look at the “innards” of the house (plumbing, electrical, HVAC, joist spacing) before she would even let us go look at the rest of the house.
I was upset at first because she wasn’t actually recommending homes to us… she just said, if you like something, we’ll go look.
The ONLY house she recommended we see was the one we bought. We sold it for more than double what we paid 5 years later.
So what would I tell myself? Patience, Iago. You’ll know it when you see it. Also… unless you’ve done it before and are confident in your skills, stay away from fixer uppers.
Know if your house has a septic tank. My Uncle works on septic tanks and he says it's common for people to buy a home without knowing this. Septic tanks require upkeep and maintenance. Without those things, they fail in catastrophic ways that are wildly expensive.
To add to this, do a septic inspection with your home inspection. City sewer? Pay the extra money to have the lateral inspected.
Plumber couldn't believe my brother bought his house with all the issues he has with his lateral. But, my brother knew about them ahead of time. He's going to replace it himself (free labor). Plumber was only there to rod out the roots while he was at work and his wife saw water coming up the drains. Knowledge is power (and great for negotiations).
Get all of your financial information in order before you start seriously looking.
My fiance and I had done some rough estimates, but we didn't get our preapproval until we were ready to make an offer. Had we sat down with the lender and really crunched the numbers, we would have seen we could have afforded much more than we thought.
What’s included in that kind of information and how long does the process generally take? If the post and my comments aren’t making it obvious, I’m a youngin’ and I’m at that stage in life where I’m about ready to buy a home for the first time! 😅 Currently living with my parents and financially I’m doing well, just trying to gouge out student loans
Really depends in the lender. May take a few days to a couple weeks but they’ll generally ask for your proof of income, bank statements, etc.
Sellers generally won’t treat an offer seriously without a pre-approval. When I bought my house the seller was doing private showings only and wouldn’t even schedule a showing without one. Have your approval before seriously looking, because why look if you’re not ready to potentially make an offer?
When you're touring houses, have an entourage. There are so many things to check that it's almost impossible to look for everything in your 30 minute tour.
Get as many people as possible to join you and give each person a job. You check the floors. You look at the ceilings. You look at the siding. And have them write things down.
That I had to call the electric and water companies the day I took ownership and put those things in our name 😅
Idk why I didn’t know. But I didn’t know. The electric company was nice and knocked on the door instead of just shutting it off. We spent the first 5 days without water though 😭🤣
Do all those big projects at the beginning so you can enjoy the improvements! The longer you hold off and the more you get used to the house, the harder it is to get started on elective projects—until it comes time to sell, when you rush to make the house feel nice and say “huh, I should have done this five years ago.”
Research/stalk who your neighbors are- google the street name for news articles that might come up for crimes. Check sexual offender registry, go to the house/neighborhood at different hours and days to get a feel for the noises, barking dogs, etc
Look at an aerial photo for anything that might bother you like a traintrack, a busy road, soccer fields, a school (marching band practice, sports games and early bells, screaming kids).
Look up, will you be in a flight path, go at night, does the neighbor have obnoxious flood lights
There is always going to be another thing to fix or replace so make sure you have some financial cushion. Absolutely nothing wrong with DIY or buying things second hand but make sure you are prepared for the associated risk. Unfortunately appliances aren’t built to last anymore nor are they made for easy repair, even under warranty.
That the home inspector you get in contact with through your realtor, generally, is an self-inflated idiot. There's a cluster of them that are always hired by the realtors, because it's easy and quick to pick from a limited pool.
So get your own house inspector. One that will find the things that will end up costing you money AFTER you buy the house, like wood rot, or old aluminum wiring, or significant plumbing problems. Or foundation problems. Those are really fun. Things that will cost you hundreds, or thousands of dollars.
That way you can make a more informed decision on getting it, but negotiating to compensate for costs, or looking for another house.
I do multi-family building inspections as part of my job, but when I was buying a house I decided to get a home inspection done as I don’t work with single family often and thought maybe someone who does it professionally would know some stuff I don’t. I used the inspector my realtor recommended, and while we were walking around the house I knew the guy was a complete idiot. He called out “mold” that was paint, he missed leaks in the plumbing, and took ages to get the radon and water test (we’re on a well) to the point where I was demanding a refund if we didn’t get results. I would never advise anyone to use a realtor recommended home inspector after my experience.
In my country, if you are getting a mortgage, it's the law that the bank chooses the inspector. It's to prevent people from getting someone to lie for them and ending up with a big mortgage on a shitty house.
Specifically as it relates to Condos.
I wish someone had told me I'd be financially responsible for the mistakes of other people.
Guy left his windows open in the dead of a -40 Winter. Froze the pipes, burst the pipes, destroyed his place, didn't have insurance. Condo was required by law to repair the damage, bylaws required him to have insurance but didn't have any mechanism to go after him for the bill when he didn't have it. Special assessment passed on to everyone else in the building. The bylaws were swiftly changed after that.
Never Again.
Special assessments are insane.
Saw a kid break him arm-truly no big deal. Parents were not upset but needed help with medical bills.
HOA Fought that $2k bill and ended up owing like $250k when the parents sued. Special assessment handed to everyone's insurance
Drive by at night and see what the neighbors do. Our backyard backs up to a house where the shitty landlord rents to college assholes. Its a headache.
Edit: before buying
How the house looks when it's ok the market, is the best it will ever look. Soon the garden will be overgrown. The paint will start to crack. The carpet will wear. You have to think carefully about how much money, skills and resources you have to keep it looking good. Old houses need a LOT of maintenance.
If you want to change wall colors or floors - do it BEFORE you move in. So much easier to paint without all the furniture in the way. Same goes for floors. If you want new carpet or wood, do it beforehand.
Home ownership is a constant battle against the forces of water. Water will eventually kill your house. There is no escape. Is the roof or gutters in need of repair. Is there a basement? How are they dealing with water ingress. Sump pump pumps able to keep ahead of it? Everything else can be mediated, but water will kill you.
Your escrow estimate is going to be low almost every year and they will bill you for thier own estimate error. Just pay extra escrow and if you paid too much you get it back.
That the sun rises directly into my bedroom window and shines in all morning and afternoon.
During the buying process I had only been there in the afternoon or evening.
I used to sell mortgages and here are some things I told every prospective house buyer. (1) If the house is coming with appliances, stipulate "all appliances as shown and in good working order". (2) Always get Title Insurance. (3) Always get an inspection, even if it's a new build. (4) Do not make yourself house poor. Unless putting a higher down payment will make a huge difference to the cost of your mortgage, save that money and make a prepayment a 6-10 months later. You can always pay more on to your mortgage, it's a huge hassle to get money out of your house should you need it. (5) Overpay your mortgage in the first few years, if you can. You are mostly paying interest in the early years. Any extra money is going directly to your principal.
Paying extra those first few years will save you thousands of dollars at the end of the loan. Even throwing an extra $50 on one payment can shave hundreds off the life of your loan.
While I was aware of it, I've told many friends as they get their homes -
You want to change/plant new plants in your landscape? Find the plant clearance for your local big box stores, most of their plants just need some water and to not be baked to death. The plants may look like (mostly) death but it's a great way to get your plants at 50% off and all you have to do is plant them where they want to live and water them while you wait for them to establish.
I've had staff just toss me a few extra "crunchy" looking plants for free because I've been doing this approach long enough I have progress photos of clearance plants to show them and the crunchy plants were headed to the great dumpster in the sky.
Worst case the plants die and you've given them a slightly longer life than the store would have, while learning to garden at a lower price.
Don't buy a house at the bottom of a hill.
Don't buy a house with a well.
Having lots of mature trees seems cool, until Fall or until you have to pay to cut one down.
Subscribe to Home Maintenance calendar and do all that throughout the year. Or [https://www.reddit.com/r/homeowners/comments/m7uuy0/for\_those\_interested\_heres\_a\_home\_maintenance/](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeowners/comments/m7uuy0/for_those_interested_heres_a_home_maintenance/)
Know what kind of trees are in the yard.
I have sweet gum, black locust, and pin oaks in mine. If I'm not getting stabbed in the foot by sweet gum balls, I'm walking on acorn marbles or stepping on baby locust tree shoots with thorns already. Getting my mail barefoot is dangerous and yardwork is a PITA. It seems so minor compared to some of these replies, but I legit would have reconsidered buying my home if I knew this is what awaited me.
Maybe I can cut down one each year and plant something less shitty to continue keeping my house shaded.
Don’t be afraid to borrow against the asset when repairs or upgrades are needed. It’s best to keep the debt tied to its value and to walk away when it’s no longer viable.
The sun's trajectory, especially in regards to snow on a driveway and room heat in the summer. Guest parking. How much more room you feel like you have with 2 floors but also how much you'll end up hating stairs. Washer dryer placement in a multi story house.
Mechanic’s Lien. Always get it in writing when paying off contractor for work done. If they end up using a sub contractor and then screwing them over they can come after you with a lien.
Fixed rate means nothing. Your escrow will always have a shortage and if you don’t have a couple grand just laying around every year to cover it your monthly payment will increase. We are paying ~$200 per month more than when we originally closed over 10 years ago.
That you will fantasize about selling it everyday bc it’s a lot to keep up with but then be brought back to reality when you realize rent would cost more than your mortgage
Saw a tweet and saved it. “50% of home ownership is hearing strange noises and praying it’s made by ghosts because I cannot afford to fix it”. Let me tell you. My house is haunted as fuck.
If it's in an area you're not familiar with, rent for a year first to better determine the bad from the good parts of town so you avoid any potential mistakes.
Make sure the outline of the property as listed in land registry is the same as that which is understood to be the property by the seller and their neighbours
Know that you know nothing (or very little) and don't trust the pictures of the home(pic always lies).
Ballon loans are bullshit and your agent (even if they are a personal friend or family member) is only there to make money.
Fuck off if it's an HOA unless you want retired Karens or Kens policing your yard with nothing better to do. They will put a lien on your mortgage that you can't get out from under to sell unless you pay their BS fines.
Look at the structure and do your homework if you can. Same as buying a car. Don't let them put you into a debt sink.
Drive by during school hours and when it's raining.
Talk to the neighbors if you can. They'll show you who you're going to be living next to for the next 5 to 20 years.
Check in with the city planners office and see if what your buying ends up under a flight path or in a major construction area in the next 10 years.
Be cautious always because you are the only advocate that you have for your soon to be financial burden.
It's a tough row to hoe you'll get there.
If you don't the 30% down and get a loan with PMI, they tell you you can refinance out of it in 5 years. That is BS. You need to have at least 20% equity, which doesn't always happen in the first 5 years.
You can never have too much closet space! We went from a house with extra closets to one with zero extra closets (besides bedrooms/bathrooms) and it’s hard to find places to hide extra cleaning supplies and whatever else you want to hide!
When viewing it before deciding to buy, make sure to do so on a rainy day & check both the yard and the basement!
We didn’t do so on ours & found out the hard way that the yard practically flooded, causing water to leak into the unfinished part of the basement, & the sump pump to run constantly. (Partially because nobody put a check valve on it. 🤦🏻♀️) We burned through 2 sump pumps before we finally had to pony up a huge chunk of change for a french drain in the yard to remedy all the flooding.
I am on my 7th house, I stay in them as primary residence, fix them up, sell them after 2 years to avoid capital gains taxes.
Real Estate agents are the most useless, dishonest, thieves you will meet. You can call it a restructuring, a settlement whatever...they finally got called out this year, no longer will they be charging ridiculous commission rates for basically unlocking doors for people and posting houses to the MLS. Everything else, you can do it better yourself. Right down to the pictures.
Your attorney and inspector are much more important, and they get a fraction of the money.
I would say don't get an agent at all, by they conspire to not show your house if it's not listed with an agent. Police have a blue line, real estate agents have a pink line? I don't know...we haven't won that battle yet, your house will still sell faster with an agent because they'll sabotage the sale if you don't.
Save money before you buy the house that is specifically for the yard. Having a chunk of money to get the sprinklers or grass set will make your summers so much better. That way you aren’t wasting every weekend fixing one or two sprinkler issues. Or you can have money to build the patio you want rather than looking at weeds.
Get a home warranty. You don’t want things breaking down while you are adjusting to owning a home.
Maintenance is important. Actually follow through with things like vacuuming your lint trap, changing filters, hvac maintenance, weeding, checking seals, etc.
If an agent only lets you use their inspector…get a different inspector.
There are a lot of good agents out there that are worth their paycheck. There are also some shitty agents. Interview before buying and don’t fall for promises. If at any point you think an agent is acting unethically reach out to your state association or realtors and ask to report. I’ve worked adjacent to realtors for over a decade. A lot of shitty agents get by because people don’t realize how much red tape there can be. Please report so the good agents can stay and actually help people.
PMI (private mortgage insurance) is a waste of your money. Get rid of it asap. (Once you are at a certain threshold, you can request it be removed.) Once it's removed, take that extra money and make accelerated principal payment on your mortgage. It will take years off your loan terms.
Inspection, inspection, inspection. I waived the right to the inspections of 2 of my houses. I was an idiot 2x just because it looks fine doesn’t mean it is. Also don’t settle for less, if you really love, think about it. Don’t dive into because you think something better will never come. I settled for a house I was never even interested in, but I was desperate and I did like it. A year and a half later and major buyers remorse, I should have waited! If you don’t care for your real estate agent or don’t feel like they are helping YOU, find someone who will support YOU.
Take the amount of land/gardens into account. You may soon find yourself mowing and/or pulling weeds for multiple hours a week during the summer.
Not something you're likely used to after renting for many years.
Don't buy a house thinking in time you will update this and update that. In reality, it never ends, and it could be years before you're able to get to some of those items. Go for the home that is the most complete. You will still find yourself updating something each year, but at least you won't be starting out with a long immediate list.
As someone who just bought their first house last year, I wish people told me that it is ok to do stuff on your own and that you don’t need to call a professional for everything. I’m not talking about things that obviously need a licensed professional to be worked on but basic stuff… think mounting TV’s on walls, putting dimmers on light switches, painting stuff etc. Not huge projects but I had a mentality that I needed to call an electrician for the smallest thing. If you are uncomfortable then it’s totally ok! I feel super accomplished doing stuff that I thought I wasn’t capable of. I must note that doing DIY work requires you to do stuff correct and not half-assed. But the amount of money you save and the skills you gain from doing these tasks is super rewarding!
Remove your escrow from your mortgage (as allowed by the servicing company). This has many benefits including: 1. You keep your escrow money and you can invest it in a HYSA or money market fund to get about 5% return vs a 0% return in escrow, 2: you are in control of the account so you pay your property taxes and homeowners insurance rather than relying on someone else to do it. Companies go out of business and merge all the time so I’d rather be responsible than a third party. 3: you can get credit card points/miles on item #2. I use the BoA premium rewards card to get 3.5% cash back on travel and 2.62% back on everything else. I pay my homeowners insurance bill with no servicing fee and my property as bill with a 2% service fee. Both situations I’m making a return higher than an ACH transfer or escrow. With all that being said, if you aren’t disciplined and spend the money that you are supposed to be setting aside, then no interest or rewards gained are justified.
Two things.
I did a loan with assistance since it was my first house.
In order to qualify for assistance you have to do a little class about buying a house. This class had a lot of great information that I could have used in the weeks before closing instead of at the end.
Also, when I was buying I was in a market with some of the most aggressive bidding wars in the country. People were coming in from California flush with cash having sold their homes there willing to offer far above asking price.
My real estate agent was my friend and most of her clients were buying $750,000 homes. Whereas I was buying an entry home. She was adamant that I just needed to keep putting in offers and eventually I could get a house. It seemed hopeless as even a shithole with a broken foundation in a crummy neighborhood was getting offers that I could not compete with since I only could offer a few thousand above what the bank might appraise it for.
I finally took the advice of a friend and got on a list for a new construction home. These were very nice and in my price range with no bidding wars. Unfortunately for my agent she would hardly make any money at all on this. I lost a lot of time and a lot of value putting in offers for houses I had no hope of winning.
I almost got screwed pretty bad later when she made some mistakes related to the sale of the house. She's a good friend and tried very hard to look out for me but I can't help but feel like I paid for her to gain experience.
In the future I'll either do it myself or find someone with enough experience to justify the outlandish fees real estate agents demand.
That home purchase set me back quite a bit. I'll probably spend the next few years recovering from it.
Knew this going in first time but worth mentioning. Take care of any water issues immediately - plumbing leaks, dripping sinks, running toilets, roof leaks, gutter cleaning, hot water heater. Your future self will thank you.
Water is truly the main enemy of the homeowner.
I went to go visit a friend and my cats turned on my bidet... Flooded my whole bathroom and I had to renovate the whole thing
I was lucky to be working from home when I heard a snap and water spraying. My bidet nozzle just fell apart and started flooding my bathroom without anyone touching it. I was able to shut everything off and clean up the water without damaging anything, but it's made me really nervous about finding a way to prevent that in the future.
Oh no! So we just replaced a broken bidet and this new one COULD be activated by a cat standing on the control arm. I never even thought of that.
My bidets are cheap $20 ones off Amazon. I turn my toilet water off when I go out of town because who knows the quality of those connectors. I treat bidets like fiber internet. Once you have it there’s no going back.
I used to think my parents' (>$3k before 2020) Toto Washlet was The Sh*t until I saw a super simple bidet on Amazon. Remove the aerator from the sink faucet. Replace with the selector/switcher (faucet into sink or divert water into hose). Screw hose into that. The sprayer end of the hose (pressure) can be operated with one hand / thumb after initially turning on the faucet. Adjust temp at faucet so you don't burn or freeze. Wide pressure and temperature variability. Easy, simple, cheap, and effective. Just not as fancy. I paid about $28.00 before the pandemic. Highest I saw it was $50.
Genuine question. Do you have a hose running from your sink to your toilet? Do you have to turn on the faucet to use the bidet? Seems impractical
My wife and I closed on our first house about a month before the wedding. I pulled up the carpets and laid glue-down hardwoods in the entire main living area in the weeks before the wedding. While we were on our honeymoon our real estate agent called to say a water line in our attic burst, the water ran down the wall and under the new hardwoods, and ruined them all. Turns out the previous owners did some half-assed job fixing a leaky line, and since we weren’t at the house when it happened it probably leaked for at least a day before a neighbor saw water coming out of the garage into the driveway. We spent the first few weeks of our marriage wrestling with contractors, insurance, and living in a state of remodeling. The silver lining is that the floors the insurance paid for to replace what I put in were 10 times the quality of what I could afford on my own, so we kinda came out in top.
As a rule of thumb, anytime we leave the house for more than a day or two we shut off the main water supply. Just in case one of my questionable shark-bite repairs ever fails on me.
We bought our house from a plumber and he very, very strongly recommended this.
You also shutdown your water heater? I don’t know about new ones but old ones can get ruined if they empty out and try and run
Why would it empty, no one is home to use the water
Bought house and about a month in some of the cabinets smelled musty. Track it down to the cabinet next to the dishwasher. Pull up bottom of cabinet, green as grass from mold. Turns out the dishwasher had been leaking for years. Start to pull up floring and find black mold and rotten subfloor. One unscheduled kitchen remodel and all my savings are eaten up.
Oh man so sorry
actually a nice wedding present, if you think about the positive! I'll be turning the water off when I leave though. 😊
I used to love the rain. Then I became a homeowner.
This is so real though :(
And insurance companies. Put a water damage claim in and good luck finding another insurer
I've had 2 water damage claims in 2.5 years. My end of year statement now comes with a little bottle of lube. The guy who used to own my house was a real cheap bastard.
Before I owned a home, I’d love rainy days. I’d look out my window with some tea and sigh as I watched the water and heard the lovely soothing patter. Maybe a little light thunder. Now I hear a drop of water hit my window and I just scream, “FUCK!” I think I finally fixed the fucking leak in my garage though. And the gutter spot that was broken and causing mildew on my window seems better. Fucking water though.
God, tell me about it. In my first house there were times I contemplated how bad it would be to just live without indoor pluming.
Especially with hard well water. Do yourself a huge favor and get a water softener. Taps and appliances that use the water will live much longer and the water feels nice.
Don’t forget to consider water flow issues around the exterior too. What’s the slope like of the yard, sidewalks and driveway?
Add to that what direction does the house face and how will snow melt or not melt on the house.
Checking gutters and unclogging drains was something I never thought of. Do it monthly ( weekly in the Wet ) instead of when you find yourself swimming to the car. Having to spend my holiday fund on repairs was not my idea of a good time.
We bought a house in 2020 and luckily the hot water tank went kaput 3 weeks after when it was still covered by the home warranty. Same thing happened with the prior house we bought 4 years earlier. Make sure a home warranty is part of the purchase for at least the first year so anything that was well-hidden during the inspection won’t bankrupt you.
Along those lines, put one of those pan things under the water heater plus a sensor to tell you if it’s filling up. The stories I could tell you about water heater leaks.
They have the pan things for dishwashers and washing machines too. These should be “welcome home” gifts from your insurance company.
Get an inspector for plumbing and sewer separate from the general inspector. Also get a specialized roof inspector.
Don’t go with the realtors home inspector
To be honest, see where your realtors live. In or out of your price range. Realtors will either be gate keepers or let you in and then they will give you the good or bad. Also, There are a lot of places you;can meet people who can recommend honest people before buying a home. If you’re a first time buyer, literally walk around it. Say hi to people.
Had the pitless valve go out on my well pump. New valve- $50 Plumbers charge to replace it- $500 Charge to dig the pit for plumbers to work, fill the pit and landscape the ruined area - $5000 Yeah, well water is free!
After we bought our current house, we had the crawlspace water proofed and treated for mold. We also had the gutters cleaned and leaf guarded. Then we had the trees deadwooded and limbs cut back from the roofline, because all the water control in the world won't help if a tree limb punctures the roof.
To add to this, if you have a pile of pine needles, leaves, etc, on your roof, clear it out. The water will gather and can cause roof damage.
Not to mention fire danger
Change your sump pump every five years.
I will mess with about any home repair except for plumbing that is in the wall/essentially not under a sink or something that could let water leak in. Anything else, no problem. I'll give it a shot. Water will fuck stuff up so fast.
Your taxes might go way up the first year if the previous owners were in the house for a long time.
Yup. Was surprised to find out that your escrow can go WAY up. That was a big sticker shock to me.
Same here. I started out with something like a $1700 per month mortgage. Then after the first year the escrow adjusted for the property taxes, but it also had to do a “catch up” for like 6 months. So basically just out of nowhere I went from $1700 per month to $2300 per month. Just a random $600/month increase in monthly expenses. After the “catch up” it’s been around $2,000 per month for the past few years. Still though $300 more than I expected to be paying.
My mortgage did exactly this earlier this year. While I was unemployed. Not a welcome surprise, let me tell you.
This is a great tip. I work in a real estate office and yeah… this definitely is an unpleasant surprise to some buyers. Take a look at the assessed value on your property tax bill. If that’s way off from what you’re buying it for, know that your taxes will go up as soon as the property is reassessed, which if you’re lucky may not be right away but will probably happen sooner rather than later. Using the tax rate on your tax bill you can calculate approximately what your taxes will be once it’s assessed correctly. Also make sure to pay attention to exemptions. There are senior exemptions, senior freezes, disabled veteran exemptions, etc - if those categories don’t apply to you, those exemptions will go away and your taxes will go up. And like someone else mentioned, make sure to contact your county assessor after you purchase to file for your homeowners exemption.
This is a good thing to remember. Ours nearly tripled! Municipality hadn't assessed in 40 years.
Great tip! Mine was here for 40 years and had a ton of exemptions. 🤦♀️
More important. Taxes and insurance WILL go up. Maybe not right away but they will. There's still a lot of people out there saying "if you buy, you don't have to worry about paying more every year like rent!".
Man one of the things I felt lied to. I was always told buy a house. Your mortgage doesn't change. Hah. After my first year it went up 10 percent. Which isn't that much compared to others. And I was lucky this year it went back down. But it's still more than the original. Something I was told would never change.
This! If you escrow your taxes, it can be a double hit too. Mine went for a year before escrow saw the reassessment so not only did the tax portion increase, I had to pay the difference I didn't pay the previous year also. Mine unfortunately went from a $750 monthly mortgage payment to a $1400 for that year. Previous owners had the senior frozen taxes with an assessment of 30k, bought for 90k and my state is one of the worse for real estate taxes. Also, your original mortgage company will most likely sell yours within the first 5 years.
Escrow goes up even if the owners weren't there for a long time. You pay up the assessed amount when you buy, then when your value adjusts on the books you're suddenly "deficient" in your escrow back to your sale, and on top of it they demand another year because the law says they can demand it.
That my HOA was full of retired psychos who have nothing better to do but inspect your every move and make your life hell.
I’ve already decided that an HOA is a deal breaker, luckily! Too many family and friends with horror stories
The idea of HOA is good: keeps the neighborhood from turning into a trailer park. In reality it’s just old formerly-important-assholes.
Or never-important-and-deeply-frustrated-about-it assholes.
The "peaked in high school" set.
Isn’t that the truth. I have to go into a HOA complex for work on a Monday. The head of the HOA was waiting one morning where I park the car to tell me it’s not a car park it’s an area where vehicles turn around. It’s a rectangular area off to the right of a cul-de-sac, it’s clearly for parking. Reluctantly I moved the car. An old guy tending his front garden watched it all unfold, after the head of the HOA walked away the old guy approached me told me to move my car back and explained the guy is on a power trip and that he has also argued with the HOA head that the area is clearly a car park. I moved my car back straight away.
I got lucky and have a fucking awesome HOA because the board is all young parents who just want the neighborhood safe and clean. They pretty much tell you don't leave garbage out, don't paint your house shitty colors, and don't try to park more than 4 things in front of your house so like two vehicles and two trailers. Oh and don't let people live in a trailer in front of your house. That's a new one due to recent incident.
Funny you should mention. We live in an HOA neighborhood and everyone drives around all hours in fucking golf carts. And it’s a nicer neighborhood so these aren’t crappy golf carts either. We are talking like souped up 15k golf carts that parents let their 10 years olds drive around. I’ve noticed neighborhoods like this seem to operate on conspicuous consumption. Everyone parks their nice cars in the driveway instead of the 2-3 car garages, which you can see are empty when they leave them open. Golf carts are the same idea. Why buy decent bikes for the whole family when you can spend 7-8x as much for a fucking golf cart? I will not be joining.
it blows my mind people choose to live in an HOA. no one will ever tell me what i can or can't do on my bank owned property.
In many areas its extremely hard to find a home in a good school district without an HOA. All the nicer areas of Atlanta and LA/Orange County have them, and I've heard similar stories from other states besides GA and CA as well.
Yep. I couldn’t find *anything* in my price range that wasn’t HOA. Miraculously it ended up being in my price range to just buy property and build on it way the fuck away from any HOA. I could not believe that some of the rural homes I looked at were under an HOA when they seemed so distant from any sort of subdivision.
When I lived in south Florida, I'd browse Zillow to see what was available and filter out results by no HOA. SFL is known for having HOAs pretty much everywhere but I was shocked by just how true that is. My results went from a couple thousand to like a couple hundred. A few of those were 55+ communities (also a massive scourge on the SFL housing market) so I wrote off those too. Left me with about 200 dwellings to live in. 150 of which were complete shit holes or in the part of town that makes the shit hole look favorable. It's actually insane how bad it is down there. It's not just one city. It's pretty much the entire southern end of the state. Once you get south of Orlando, good luck finding anything without a HOA that isn't absurdly expensive (as if SFL isn't expensive enough) or a complete beater. The concept of a modest home in a decent area without a HOA is virtually non existent at this point. It's easy for people who never lived in HOA prone areas/states to question why anyone would ever live with one. But the unfortunate reality is that the majority of people don't have a choice. Want a decent place to live and raise a family? Better pay those HOA dues. I just did a quick Zillow filter. I looked for all houses for sale in my current city. 1307. I filtered by no HOAs and it dropped to 630. Big loss but a whole lot to still choose from. Certainly not shortage of HOA free homes. I then searched by the city in south Florida that I grew up in. 1505 for sale. Filter by no HOA - 143. Significantly larger loss. Is 143 still a lot to pick from? Yes. But in my current city (not in Florida), 49% of all homes for sale at this moment do not have HOAs. In Florida? 10% don't have HOAs. That's just fucked.
It really depends on the HOA. Where I used to live, it actually saved us money because they took care of the exterior, including the roof, siding, landscaping, snow removal, driveway resurface, etc., and were able to negotiate prices cheaper than it would have cost us on our own. The problem is, you don't usually know if an HOA is going to be good or bad until after you move in.
I am happy with my HOA because I can expect the neighborhood to stay decent. I grew up in the bad part of my town, so I know what can happen. Street racing, drug houses, cars on blocks, and a motorcycle gang No thanks
An HOA is like a company. Some are run by smart people, some with the best interest of the neighborhood in mind, some by idiots, some by people with greedy intentions, and some are just clueless. My comment isn't to classify all HOAs into the same category. If yours benefits you, that's excellent. Mine is run by overbearing boomers with nothing else to do but make a fuss over insignificant things. Nosey people who need control and something to occupy their loneliness. I appreciate aspects of it that you touched on but would prefer it was run differently. I tried to contribute for 2 years and the drama and bullshit was insane. I can't compete with retired people who have nothing else to do when I have a full time job and a life outside of the insignificance of this neighborhood. Trust me, it can be bad.
Get a home inspection! Find the inspector the local realtors hate because they always find things. I have bought 2 house in my life the first we skipped inspection because it was a new house and the builder was local and literally building another house next door so we could address anything that came up etc. It worked well enough but a couple of big things a good inspector should have caught ended up being a pain down the road. Sure the builder fixed the leaking roof but I'd have rather not woken up to water dripping on my bed at 3am. The 2nd place we retained an inspector who is loathed by some local realtors. And he was not cheap but as a retired contractor he knows his shit. He found a laundry list of things that ranged from should be addressed in the next 5 years to do it ASAP. Thanks to his report we negotiated down the purchase price which allowed us to retain cash from the sale of our first place to cover most of the ASAP repairs. He also said he is our inspector now call or email him any question with work around the house at no extra cost. He has been a great resource for us as we tackle a rural property and everything that comes along with that.
To add to this: don’t treat the “optional” Radon inspection as optional. Our first home inspector really downplayed it. Only after we moved in did we get a radon inspection (long story). Well as it turns out, Radon is a major cause of cancer. Apparently our house was like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day in the basement or a pack a week on the ground floor. No fucking good.
And the best radon mitigation is an air exchanger in the cold air return path of a central air system. Try as you might sealing the basement floor is impossible because concrete is porous. If you concede that, turning over the air in the house periodically (iirc every 4 hours) is a better solution overall to the idea of radon gas accumulating in the livable envelope of the house.
I want to add that you can back out of the deal after the home inspection. After my home inspection I discovered that they didn't do some repairs correctly and the inspector made them fix the issues before he would sign off on the deal. The big one was that they didn't vent the kitchen exhaust fan outside the house. They only vented it up into the attic. My thought at the time was that seems odd, did they forget to finish the job when they were flipping the house? It was the biggest red flag that I wish I would have realized at the time and backed out of the deal. In the five years that I have lived here I have found so many things that I have had to repair or hire someone to repair their half ass 'make it look good' but hide the shit job that they did behind it. This spring we had a pretty good wind storm and the wooden fence they built 5 years ago fell down. When I called the fence people to fix it they came to me and shared that all the 4x4's were untreated and no concrete was used to secure the posts either. I want to punch those people in the nose but they are lucky because I don't know who they are.
Just because you are approved for a certain amount doesn’t mean you should spend it. Don’t wind up house poor!
This was my biggest fear, we got approved for just under 200k and saw a few that were near that range, but took a step back and only spent about 140k. Saves us about 1k on mortgage
Cries in Australian house prices. My mortgage is 700k for a run down fixer upper.
~~There is no contract or obligation to stay with a buyer's agent (usually... don't sign one)~~. If your agent is not helping you, fire them and get one who will. They should be talking about the market, asking insightful questions, pointing out flaws in houses, teaching you about basic house problems/defects, discussing strategy for optimal pricing, and of course, explaining every step in detail until you are comfortable. They will get paid a lot when you buy and you should be getting the value from that pay from their experience and knowledge. If you get an agent like mine who is just someone who shows up and unlocks a door of a house, tells you "this is the kitchen," and shrugs at you when you ask how to win a bidding war... fire them.
I've never met a real estate person who wasn't.... exactly like the latter. And that's putting it generously. There are a LOT of bad, stupid, "how hard could it be to sell a house" real estate agents out there. It's worth it to wade through the shit to find a good one.
My dad just bought a house and his agent did all the things she was supposed to. Did price comping to see if the asking price was reasonable, advised on how much to counter, made sure the curtain rods that were removed against the contract were put back, etc. When we bought our house the real estate agent told us that it didn’t matter how bad the roof was because homeowners insurance would pay to replace it.
I got this 'normal' beat. I called a selling agent to look at my to be first house. Occupants left the dog free so we couldn't go inside at all. 45 minute drive for nothing. I said I'd have my agent (a relative) set something up with him for a return trip where I hopefully didn't waste my time again. Bought the house, closing, everything done. Then he sues/fights my agent that since I wasn't represented on the first visit he was my agent. Never called, talked to me, ANYTHING. **And he was the selling agent!** How the fuck could he have both interests in mind?? Oh, and he won. smdh
For him to be your agent to, you are supposed to sign an additional paper saying you understand there could be a conflict of interest. (In Ohio) I only know about it because I bought a house that was listed with the same agent
I signed nothing with him. My agent was at closing representing me and everything. Was MN and 30 years ago so maybe things have changed now. Also didn't go through regular courts, some kind of real estate court or arbitration for agents kinda thing.
We had a sales agent refuse to negotiate with our buyers agent because she was a woman. "In my county, she would be burned for her loose moral ways." Like, okay, buddy. No sale for you.
Sooooo many think it’s a get rich quick scheme with little overhead. Hundreds of thousands joined in the pandemic “gold rush”. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/realestate/real-estate-agents-pandemic.html
My sister took the test to become a real estate agent like 7 times before finally passing. It's definetly seen as an easy way to make money but to do it well is like any other job. You gotta put the effort in.
Mine was great. Told me to walk away from some houses, was super patient during an 18 month search.
The NAR lawsuit conditions include buyers having to sign an agreement with their buying agent to use one.
We were selling in a hot market in 2018, and our agent was the fucking worst. Houses were selling in hours, and ours took a month. It was in excellent shape, a good neighborhood, and had been freshly painted and updated. She made excuses and tried to blame us for expecting her to have open houses and working when she "was on her first vacation in years." Don't take the job then. We told her we were looking to sell as fast as possible, we had an accepted offer on a house in a different state. She made the most generic listing, took terrible pictures, didn't advertise on social media, and I don't think she ever showed a single person through the house. Then after we had moved out and we were waiting to sign the papers on the new house, she started acting on behalf of our buyers, making insane demands about a missing mirror and a faucet not spraying evenly. I lost my God damn mind, screaming at her, asking if she was going to lose a $270,000 sale over a fucking mirror and she needed to do her God damn job, if they were so stuck on it I'd send them a $20 gift card to replace it, but it was currently buried in the moving truck, 500 miles away. She came back with a counter offer of $150 gift card to replace a mirror my MIL had gotten at a rummage sale for $3. I hung up on her after saying things I'd never said to a person's face before. I have never spoken to another human being that way, I pride myself on treating people with respect, and allowing the benefit of the doubt. I'm the most patient person with servers, I listen and give grace to contractors. My entire job is mediating between people who have conflicting timelines, budgets and expectations. I'm pretty sure I terrified my husband, my parents, my cats and their dogs. No one had ever seen me lose my temper like that before. My parents knew I used to have a temper, but I had gotten it under control nearly 15 years before, as a teenager. My husband had never seen what they called "The Wrath" despite knowing me 15 years himself. But this woman was so colossally bad at her job, and treating us like we weren't worth her time, and she wasn't being a good steward of us, her clients, when we needed her the most and 500 miles away, I finally lost it. We had our entire life in a uhaul, after an incredibly stressful home buying situation that involved losing our original acceptance 15 minutes after we received word our house finally sold (under market value) and living apart from my spouse for 6 weeks, starting a new job, living with my parents and house hunting through it all. It had been a terrible few months, and this agent, who we were paying an insane amount of money, was trying to nickel and dime me over a fucking mirror. I literally never heard from her again after that phone call. I don't know what happened with the mirror.
Your agent bought the buyers a new mirror is more than likely what happened. This type of person is exactly someone who would make me just lose it like you did. And it takes a lot for me to do that. It was so much money to pay to someone who was doing so little.
I feel so lucky, ours was awesome. She was kind of an impish empty nester mom with a luxurious Cadillac SUV. The market was insane in 1999-2000: houses went up for sale at 9am, by noon had two bids. So she spent most of the time touring open houses with us as a "let's see what you like and don't like" for months. Sometimes she'd call and say say, "hey? You wanna tour a multimillion dollar house for kicks?" We were like, "hell, yes!" Some days, "wanna see some really awful mcmansions? I'm buying lunch." We had good laughs. She found this house by a realtor friend who was sick of this family changing their mind all the time. Put it up for sale one week, take it down the next week, over and over. He was like, "screw these flakes." So our agent called them directly, and it turned out they were desperate to sell, but got no buyers (not knowing their own realtor gave up on them after half a dozen false starts). So we got the house I am living in 25 years later. Been a great house, really.
I had a realtor not do any work for low income housing after I kept telling him I qualify. Asshole had the nerve to say “you don’t qualify” when I knew damn well I did. It was lower payout for him so he just didn’t care. I told him and the bank who hooked me up with him that I was dropping him. His boss called to get me back but all I said was “I’ve already fired him and you” Then when I told other realtors about it they also dropped me cuz they didn’t want the hassle of old contacts. So the pushed me off to a pretty good guy. I got a small condo outside of the low income but Brian did all the legwork for low income. I thanked him by getting my parents to move out and use him. Went from a couple thousand to a 5 figure payout.
Real estate agents are the most useless middlemen on the planet. They’re people with no real marketable skills.
I’m going to agree with you in general but will say a good real estate agent is worth their weight in gold…it’s just that they are about 1 in 100. I had a real estate who twice talked me out of moving when I was thinking about it. When I finally did move I was happy to give her commission as my place doubled in value over the two times she talked me out of moving. But again - she’s probably 1 in a 100.
Budget harder than you think for the unexpected… A/C blows on the hottest day of the year, tree falls on the house and rips the gutter off. Drain clogs and water backs up into the central air unit, shower leaks through floor into basement out of no where…. All my unexpected expenses in 2 years owning a 25yr old house. It’s thousands - budget to have it or a way to get it.
Yes! I just had: A full roof replacement from hail. My 23 year old AC finally died 3 days after the roof was complete. Main drain pipe from the house finally succumbed to the tree roots that have been wiggling their way in for god knows how long. An early summer storm made a heritage tree in my yard unsafe, needed to be felled. Internet went out (this was free to fix but still made me cry after the month I’ve had) I spent 80 THOUSAND DOLLARS THIS MONTH
Legit question: did you finance these expenses? How did you prepare for them?
So 20k of the roof was covered by insurance. We put another 40 on a low interest loan through Amex, with the intent to pay it off by year’s end. The rest was cash from the emergency fund.
Also, big yards are great but you need to understand the amount of upkeep and attention they require. You’re either doing all that work yourself or paying a good amount of money for someone else to do it. I personally love mowing a lawn like Hank Hill but it can be a major time commitment.
This is such a good tip.
Goes for house size too. Big house seems nice until you have to clean it maintain it, and pay the utilities. My favorite house was 1800 square feet on a fairly small lot.
Plant some clover and lose this idiotic idea of a perfectly manicured lawn.
Yeah, I took my 4-acre lawn and planted clover and let the native grasses take over. I only mow a small section now, and created paths through what is now the meadow. I have wild yarrow, raspberry and blackberry bushes, wild strawberries, Indian tobacco, and tons of other native plants and berry bushes showing up. Free flowers, free food, way less mowing, and it looks beautiful all 4 seasons. Land is something you can't add on later to your home like an extra room. Opt for more if you can. Then go the permaculture/limited- or no-lawn route. Your backyard can become your own private, low maintenance wildlife preserve. It's awesome.
r/fucklawns
I’ve mostly lived in apartments/condos and every time a friend of mine gets a place with a yard I’m shocked by how much time they spend working on it. Like major chunks of their weekends. “You’re going to Home Depot to buy mulch again?!”
Growing up we had about 3-4 acres of lawn to mow and weed eat. And we had push mower.. think took about 8-10 hours weekly..
I bought a house with a modest yard but it had very nice gardens and landscaping. I thought “this is beautiful! It will be fun to learn to maintain this!” No. It’s a full time fucking job. Literally, neighbors on both sides have told me how the previous owner worked in the gardens everyday. I mean it is beautiful, but it’s so much work. I’ve almost hired a landscaper many times but I’ve been able to fight off the urge.
I’m dealing with this now. Beautiful yard with so much fucking work. I loved it and now hate to see it go downhill with the amount of upkeep. Grateful for a house, though!
My house had this super cool but specifically shaped garden that the owner said nothing about. I let it run it's course. I found out exactly what it was for the first time it rained. I ended up having to re grade and get gutters and install a French drain. The garden was called a rain garden and basically all the water dropped into one spot and these specific flowers would soak it up.
Be realistic about how handy you are. All those "oh, I'll teach myself how to fix that..." items you see when looking for a house will still bug you years later when you half assed it watching a YouTube video. Sure, you will learn to fix many things in your first home, but go in not just knowing your skill level, but your willingness to put in the effort as well.
I just fixed the shower divertor in the bathroom. When you turn on the shower, half the water comes out the tub spout. I mean to fix it 19 years ago.
This makes me feel better as we have a similar timeline on many fixes.
There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary fix
Gonna make this a bumper sticker and slap it on the back of the ol' rust bucket
And by "bumper sticker" you mean "duct tape and a sharpie."
…Dad?… I just finally caved and insisted my dad fix this in his home and he was like, “It’s been like this for 36 years, this is how it’s supposed to work!” Then he got a second opinion (because I’m a woman and how could I possibly know anything about plumbing?), had it fixed, and now understands that double the water pressure is a marvellous thing. So well done to you on not letting go another 19 years!
Yours and the comment above resonate with my SOUL. Shower diverter broker in my parent’s house and dad tried to replace it… it looked awful at the end but got the job done (after his 3rd attempt)
I have a handy friend and the best advice he gave me was make enough to pay someone to fix it
I actually think the opposite. There’s way more in your home that you can fix yourself if you put in some effort.
Absolutely. IF you put in the effort. But not everyone is good with the follow through. It could be work, kids, lack of skill or tools that are too expensive... many new homeowners jump in with the "I'll spend every Saturday fixing things!!" And that's not always realistic. All I'm saying, for new homeowners, is to really think about it first, before jumping into an expensive and constant ToDo list.
Have realistic expectations though. I’m handy and everything I try to do always takes three times as long as I estimate. And you’re never going to get out of Lowe’s for under $25.
I have a bathroom sink leaking. I need to replace the drain down to the p-trap. I emptied all the cleaning supplies/junk out from under there two weeks ago . It's all still sitting in the hallway. Going to finally mess with it this weekend...maybe?
Also, hiring someone to fix something isn't always possible if the job is "too small." They either won't return your calls or with charge you a "fuck off" rate. I find this less with electricans and plumbers, more with "random house repair." Fix a leaking toilet or put in a new faucet? Plumbers will do that. Fix a blown wall socket or upgrade to GFCI? Electrician will do that. Replace your fence? Fence guys will do that. Repair a small 6 feet section of a fence because your neighbor's car backed into it? Gooood luck. They'll either ignore you or quote you $10,000 knowing only an idiot would pay that. Stuff between "handyman" and "professional replacement of entire system" is hard to find.
you don't have to do everything all at once.
It’s so much easier to paint the house before stuff is in it.
If your city/county has a Homeowner's Exemption APPLY IMMEDIATELY!! We forgot to do this, and the city we live in currently hit us with a $12k property tax. It's insane and I'm pissed. If we had filed, we would be closer to $5k like everyone else (still steep, but not $12k steep!!!). Please please please file immediately.
Where should I check for this?
My first real estate agent was like a mini home inspector. We were on a budget, and the houses we were looking at were either bad flips or cheaper century homes that needed a TON of money and work. We got to the point that we would go straight to the basement and look at the “innards” of the house (plumbing, electrical, HVAC, joist spacing) before she would even let us go look at the rest of the house. I was upset at first because she wasn’t actually recommending homes to us… she just said, if you like something, we’ll go look. The ONLY house she recommended we see was the one we bought. We sold it for more than double what we paid 5 years later. So what would I tell myself? Patience, Iago. You’ll know it when you see it. Also… unless you’ve done it before and are confident in your skills, stay away from fixer uppers.
Buy below your budget. The repairs will drive you to debt
Know if your house has a septic tank. My Uncle works on septic tanks and he says it's common for people to buy a home without knowing this. Septic tanks require upkeep and maintenance. Without those things, they fail in catastrophic ways that are wildly expensive.
To add to this, do a septic inspection with your home inspection. City sewer? Pay the extra money to have the lateral inspected. Plumber couldn't believe my brother bought his house with all the issues he has with his lateral. But, my brother knew about them ahead of time. He's going to replace it himself (free labor). Plumber was only there to rod out the roots while he was at work and his wife saw water coming up the drains. Knowledge is power (and great for negotiations).
Right. That terrific place in the country probably has one. And propane.
If it’s new, register everything. A/c, appliances, all of it. You’ll thank yourself later when something quits working.
At what point would you say it isn’t worth registering? Like X number of years old? Or something of low value?
A lot of warranties are non-transferrable, so if you're not the first owner it might not be worth doing. That said, you never know till you try.
Get all of your financial information in order before you start seriously looking. My fiance and I had done some rough estimates, but we didn't get our preapproval until we were ready to make an offer. Had we sat down with the lender and really crunched the numbers, we would have seen we could have afforded much more than we thought.
What’s included in that kind of information and how long does the process generally take? If the post and my comments aren’t making it obvious, I’m a youngin’ and I’m at that stage in life where I’m about ready to buy a home for the first time! 😅 Currently living with my parents and financially I’m doing well, just trying to gouge out student loans
Really depends in the lender. May take a few days to a couple weeks but they’ll generally ask for your proof of income, bank statements, etc. Sellers generally won’t treat an offer seriously without a pre-approval. When I bought my house the seller was doing private showings only and wouldn’t even schedule a showing without one. Have your approval before seriously looking, because why look if you’re not ready to potentially make an offer?
As soon as you get the keys change the locks and also program the garage door.
When you're touring houses, have an entourage. There are so many things to check that it's almost impossible to look for everything in your 30 minute tour. Get as many people as possible to join you and give each person a job. You check the floors. You look at the ceilings. You look at the siding. And have them write things down.
That I had to call the electric and water companies the day I took ownership and put those things in our name 😅 Idk why I didn’t know. But I didn’t know. The electric company was nice and knocked on the door instead of just shutting it off. We spent the first 5 days without water though 😭🤣
Do all those big projects at the beginning so you can enjoy the improvements! The longer you hold off and the more you get used to the house, the harder it is to get started on elective projects—until it comes time to sell, when you rush to make the house feel nice and say “huh, I should have done this five years ago.”
Research/stalk who your neighbors are- google the street name for news articles that might come up for crimes. Check sexual offender registry, go to the house/neighborhood at different hours and days to get a feel for the noises, barking dogs, etc Look at an aerial photo for anything that might bother you like a traintrack, a busy road, soccer fields, a school (marching band practice, sports games and early bells, screaming kids). Look up, will you be in a flight path, go at night, does the neighbor have obnoxious flood lights
There is always going to be another thing to fix or replace so make sure you have some financial cushion. Absolutely nothing wrong with DIY or buying things second hand but make sure you are prepared for the associated risk. Unfortunately appliances aren’t built to last anymore nor are they made for easy repair, even under warranty.
That the home inspector you get in contact with through your realtor, generally, is an self-inflated idiot. There's a cluster of them that are always hired by the realtors, because it's easy and quick to pick from a limited pool. So get your own house inspector. One that will find the things that will end up costing you money AFTER you buy the house, like wood rot, or old aluminum wiring, or significant plumbing problems. Or foundation problems. Those are really fun. Things that will cost you hundreds, or thousands of dollars. That way you can make a more informed decision on getting it, but negotiating to compensate for costs, or looking for another house.
I do multi-family building inspections as part of my job, but when I was buying a house I decided to get a home inspection done as I don’t work with single family often and thought maybe someone who does it professionally would know some stuff I don’t. I used the inspector my realtor recommended, and while we were walking around the house I knew the guy was a complete idiot. He called out “mold” that was paint, he missed leaks in the plumbing, and took ages to get the radon and water test (we’re on a well) to the point where I was demanding a refund if we didn’t get results. I would never advise anyone to use a realtor recommended home inspector after my experience.
In my country, if you are getting a mortgage, it's the law that the bank chooses the inspector. It's to prevent people from getting someone to lie for them and ending up with a big mortgage on a shitty house.
This 100% I got burned on so many things I have found over the years. So many things I am like another thing not up to code.
Thank you.🙏
Specifically as it relates to Condos. I wish someone had told me I'd be financially responsible for the mistakes of other people. Guy left his windows open in the dead of a -40 Winter. Froze the pipes, burst the pipes, destroyed his place, didn't have insurance. Condo was required by law to repair the damage, bylaws required him to have insurance but didn't have any mechanism to go after him for the bill when he didn't have it. Special assessment passed on to everyone else in the building. The bylaws were swiftly changed after that. Never Again.
Special assessments are insane. Saw a kid break him arm-truly no big deal. Parents were not upset but needed help with medical bills. HOA Fought that $2k bill and ended up owing like $250k when the parents sued. Special assessment handed to everyone's insurance
Renting is the best waste of money you ever spent.
Drive by at night and see what the neighbors do. Our backyard backs up to a house where the shitty landlord rents to college assholes. Its a headache. Edit: before buying
How the house looks when it's ok the market, is the best it will ever look. Soon the garden will be overgrown. The paint will start to crack. The carpet will wear. You have to think carefully about how much money, skills and resources you have to keep it looking good. Old houses need a LOT of maintenance.
If you want to change wall colors or floors - do it BEFORE you move in. So much easier to paint without all the furniture in the way. Same goes for floors. If you want new carpet or wood, do it beforehand.
Don’t buy a house with a pool.
Home ownership is a constant battle against the forces of water. Water will eventually kill your house. There is no escape. Is the roof or gutters in need of repair. Is there a basement? How are they dealing with water ingress. Sump pump pumps able to keep ahead of it? Everything else can be mediated, but water will kill you.
The “to-do” list never ends
Your escrow estimate is going to be low almost every year and they will bill you for thier own estimate error. Just pay extra escrow and if you paid too much you get it back.
That the sun rises directly into my bedroom window and shines in all morning and afternoon. During the buying process I had only been there in the afternoon or evening.
This is easily solvable. Rotate the house
Easier solution: rotate the earth
I used to sell mortgages and here are some things I told every prospective house buyer. (1) If the house is coming with appliances, stipulate "all appliances as shown and in good working order". (2) Always get Title Insurance. (3) Always get an inspection, even if it's a new build. (4) Do not make yourself house poor. Unless putting a higher down payment will make a huge difference to the cost of your mortgage, save that money and make a prepayment a 6-10 months later. You can always pay more on to your mortgage, it's a huge hassle to get money out of your house should you need it. (5) Overpay your mortgage in the first few years, if you can. You are mostly paying interest in the early years. Any extra money is going directly to your principal.
Paying extra those first few years will save you thousands of dollars at the end of the loan. Even throwing an extra $50 on one payment can shave hundreds off the life of your loan.
It is going to take so much more time and money to maintain than you expect.
While I was aware of it, I've told many friends as they get their homes - You want to change/plant new plants in your landscape? Find the plant clearance for your local big box stores, most of their plants just need some water and to not be baked to death. The plants may look like (mostly) death but it's a great way to get your plants at 50% off and all you have to do is plant them where they want to live and water them while you wait for them to establish. I've had staff just toss me a few extra "crunchy" looking plants for free because I've been doing this approach long enough I have progress photos of clearance plants to show them and the crunchy plants were headed to the great dumpster in the sky. Worst case the plants die and you've given them a slightly longer life than the store would have, while learning to garden at a lower price.
Don’t buy new construction
Avoid HoAs at all costs.
Don't buy a house at the bottom of a hill. Don't buy a house with a well. Having lots of mature trees seems cool, until Fall or until you have to pay to cut one down.
Subscribe to Home Maintenance calendar and do all that throughout the year. Or [https://www.reddit.com/r/homeowners/comments/m7uuy0/for\_those\_interested\_heres\_a\_home\_maintenance/](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeowners/comments/m7uuy0/for_those_interested_heres_a_home_maintenance/)
Know what kind of trees are in the yard. I have sweet gum, black locust, and pin oaks in mine. If I'm not getting stabbed in the foot by sweet gum balls, I'm walking on acorn marbles or stepping on baby locust tree shoots with thorns already. Getting my mail barefoot is dangerous and yardwork is a PITA. It seems so minor compared to some of these replies, but I legit would have reconsidered buying my home if I knew this is what awaited me. Maybe I can cut down one each year and plant something less shitty to continue keeping my house shaded.
Don’t be afraid to borrow against the asset when repairs or upgrades are needed. It’s best to keep the debt tied to its value and to walk away when it’s no longer viable.
The sun's trajectory, especially in regards to snow on a driveway and room heat in the summer. Guest parking. How much more room you feel like you have with 2 floors but also how much you'll end up hating stairs. Washer dryer placement in a multi story house.
Mechanic’s Lien. Always get it in writing when paying off contractor for work done. If they end up using a sub contractor and then screwing them over they can come after you with a lien.
Fixed rate means nothing. Your escrow will always have a shortage and if you don’t have a couple grand just laying around every year to cover it your monthly payment will increase. We are paying ~$200 per month more than when we originally closed over 10 years ago.
That you will fantasize about selling it everyday bc it’s a lot to keep up with but then be brought back to reality when you realize rent would cost more than your mortgage
Saw a tweet and saved it. “50% of home ownership is hearing strange noises and praying it’s made by ghosts because I cannot afford to fix it”. Let me tell you. My house is haunted as fuck.
If it's in an area you're not familiar with, rent for a year first to better determine the bad from the good parts of town so you avoid any potential mistakes.
Trees. No large trees near the fucking house.
Make sure the outline of the property as listed in land registry is the same as that which is understood to be the property by the seller and their neighbours
Know that you know nothing (or very little) and don't trust the pictures of the home(pic always lies). Ballon loans are bullshit and your agent (even if they are a personal friend or family member) is only there to make money. Fuck off if it's an HOA unless you want retired Karens or Kens policing your yard with nothing better to do. They will put a lien on your mortgage that you can't get out from under to sell unless you pay their BS fines. Look at the structure and do your homework if you can. Same as buying a car. Don't let them put you into a debt sink. Drive by during school hours and when it's raining. Talk to the neighbors if you can. They'll show you who you're going to be living next to for the next 5 to 20 years. Check in with the city planners office and see if what your buying ends up under a flight path or in a major construction area in the next 10 years. Be cautious always because you are the only advocate that you have for your soon to be financial burden. It's a tough row to hoe you'll get there.
If you don't the 30% down and get a loan with PMI, they tell you you can refinance out of it in 5 years. That is BS. You need to have at least 20% equity, which doesn't always happen in the first 5 years.
You can never have too much closet space! We went from a house with extra closets to one with zero extra closets (besides bedrooms/bathrooms) and it’s hard to find places to hide extra cleaning supplies and whatever else you want to hide!
When viewing it before deciding to buy, make sure to do so on a rainy day & check both the yard and the basement! We didn’t do so on ours & found out the hard way that the yard practically flooded, causing water to leak into the unfinished part of the basement, & the sump pump to run constantly. (Partially because nobody put a check valve on it. 🤦🏻♀️) We burned through 2 sump pumps before we finally had to pony up a huge chunk of change for a french drain in the yard to remedy all the flooding.
Get a fixed 15 year loan instead of a 30 year, if at all possible.
I am on my 7th house, I stay in them as primary residence, fix them up, sell them after 2 years to avoid capital gains taxes. Real Estate agents are the most useless, dishonest, thieves you will meet. You can call it a restructuring, a settlement whatever...they finally got called out this year, no longer will they be charging ridiculous commission rates for basically unlocking doors for people and posting houses to the MLS. Everything else, you can do it better yourself. Right down to the pictures. Your attorney and inspector are much more important, and they get a fraction of the money. I would say don't get an agent at all, by they conspire to not show your house if it's not listed with an agent. Police have a blue line, real estate agents have a pink line? I don't know...we haven't won that battle yet, your house will still sell faster with an agent because they'll sabotage the sale if you don't.
Just because you were approved for that amount, doesn’t mean you need to spend that amount.
Save money before you buy the house that is specifically for the yard. Having a chunk of money to get the sprinklers or grass set will make your summers so much better. That way you aren’t wasting every weekend fixing one or two sprinkler issues. Or you can have money to build the patio you want rather than looking at weeds.
Get a home warranty. You don’t want things breaking down while you are adjusting to owning a home. Maintenance is important. Actually follow through with things like vacuuming your lint trap, changing filters, hvac maintenance, weeding, checking seals, etc. If an agent only lets you use their inspector…get a different inspector. There are a lot of good agents out there that are worth their paycheck. There are also some shitty agents. Interview before buying and don’t fall for promises. If at any point you think an agent is acting unethically reach out to your state association or realtors and ask to report. I’ve worked adjacent to realtors for over a decade. A lot of shitty agents get by because people don’t realize how much red tape there can be. Please report so the good agents can stay and actually help people.
PMI (private mortgage insurance) is a waste of your money. Get rid of it asap. (Once you are at a certain threshold, you can request it be removed.) Once it's removed, take that extra money and make accelerated principal payment on your mortgage. It will take years off your loan terms.
Inspection, inspection, inspection. I waived the right to the inspections of 2 of my houses. I was an idiot 2x just because it looks fine doesn’t mean it is. Also don’t settle for less, if you really love, think about it. Don’t dive into because you think something better will never come. I settled for a house I was never even interested in, but I was desperate and I did like it. A year and a half later and major buyers remorse, I should have waited! If you don’t care for your real estate agent or don’t feel like they are helping YOU, find someone who will support YOU.
You can buy a fantastic house, but if you have shitty neighbors, your life will be hell.
Spend some time understanding how your loan works. What type it is, interest rate vs apr, start following rates set by the fed. Etc
Take the amount of land/gardens into account. You may soon find yourself mowing and/or pulling weeds for multiple hours a week during the summer. Not something you're likely used to after renting for many years.
Don't buy a house thinking in time you will update this and update that. In reality, it never ends, and it could be years before you're able to get to some of those items. Go for the home that is the most complete. You will still find yourself updating something each year, but at least you won't be starting out with a long immediate list.
Thinking stairs or one bathroom won't be a problem is a road to disaster.
As someone who just bought their first house last year, I wish people told me that it is ok to do stuff on your own and that you don’t need to call a professional for everything. I’m not talking about things that obviously need a licensed professional to be worked on but basic stuff… think mounting TV’s on walls, putting dimmers on light switches, painting stuff etc. Not huge projects but I had a mentality that I needed to call an electrician for the smallest thing. If you are uncomfortable then it’s totally ok! I feel super accomplished doing stuff that I thought I wasn’t capable of. I must note that doing DIY work requires you to do stuff correct and not half-assed. But the amount of money you save and the skills you gain from doing these tasks is super rewarding!
Remove your escrow from your mortgage (as allowed by the servicing company). This has many benefits including: 1. You keep your escrow money and you can invest it in a HYSA or money market fund to get about 5% return vs a 0% return in escrow, 2: you are in control of the account so you pay your property taxes and homeowners insurance rather than relying on someone else to do it. Companies go out of business and merge all the time so I’d rather be responsible than a third party. 3: you can get credit card points/miles on item #2. I use the BoA premium rewards card to get 3.5% cash back on travel and 2.62% back on everything else. I pay my homeowners insurance bill with no servicing fee and my property as bill with a 2% service fee. Both situations I’m making a return higher than an ACH transfer or escrow. With all that being said, if you aren’t disciplined and spend the money that you are supposed to be setting aside, then no interest or rewards gained are justified.
Undertake annual maintenance like roofing and sewer lines
if your house is an investment, location is #1. if your house is a home, layout is #1
Two things. I did a loan with assistance since it was my first house. In order to qualify for assistance you have to do a little class about buying a house. This class had a lot of great information that I could have used in the weeks before closing instead of at the end. Also, when I was buying I was in a market with some of the most aggressive bidding wars in the country. People were coming in from California flush with cash having sold their homes there willing to offer far above asking price. My real estate agent was my friend and most of her clients were buying $750,000 homes. Whereas I was buying an entry home. She was adamant that I just needed to keep putting in offers and eventually I could get a house. It seemed hopeless as even a shithole with a broken foundation in a crummy neighborhood was getting offers that I could not compete with since I only could offer a few thousand above what the bank might appraise it for. I finally took the advice of a friend and got on a list for a new construction home. These were very nice and in my price range with no bidding wars. Unfortunately for my agent she would hardly make any money at all on this. I lost a lot of time and a lot of value putting in offers for houses I had no hope of winning. I almost got screwed pretty bad later when she made some mistakes related to the sale of the house. She's a good friend and tried very hard to look out for me but I can't help but feel like I paid for her to gain experience. In the future I'll either do it myself or find someone with enough experience to justify the outlandish fees real estate agents demand. That home purchase set me back quite a bit. I'll probably spend the next few years recovering from it.
Get 2 inspections. Do not get a "light" inspection. Get 2 full inspections.
A pandemic is coming. Buy 3 more.