Both Kathy and I like working with first time home buyers. The most obvious reason is they don’t have a home to sell so have a clearer picture about financing. If they are seriously looking they are seriously buying. Nice. Really though for us, it is kind of fun to help first buyers navigate through the process and assist them in thinking of things they might not.
When my husband and I bought our first house, before I was in real estate may I add, we didn’t use an agent and bought directly from the owner. Dumb. Our first house was a 1923 bungalow on the far north side of Chicago. Here is how we got there.
My husband, Don, and I had been married 9 months, had a nice down payment ready, knew what we could afford to spend, were excited at the opportunity to get that 10% interest rate (yep) and were eager to get the tax advantage of home ownership! We knew what we were doing!
Open houses! They are great. Good way to get a sense of what is out there. Maybe even fall in love with a house. BUT, if you love something, have your agent go through it with you (not the listing agent) to notice things you might not. Ask the agent to do a price comparison of properties in the area. Is the home priced well for the area and the amenities it offers?
yeah, we didn’t do any of that.
We went to a for sale by owner open house and fell in love. We fell in love with the possibilities. We could have afforded more, which is why we were sucked into thinking this was such a bargain. It wasn’t.
We didn’t want to insult the sellers! They were nice! They had two kids and seemed to really love the house. They were very proud of the fact that they had taken off and “professionally polished” all of the brass hardware on the french windows. Didn’t we see how great that was? Sellers typically place a lot of resale value on things that they feel cost a lot and had value to THEM. The brass pulls. Probably replacing a toilet would have been better for resale. No worries here though. Neither one of us had agents to bring us down to reality and we really wanted that house…lets pay asking price.
We knew it needed some TLC, don’t all old houses? So what if the kitchen, windows, bathrooms need updating! We’re in this together! We can scrape cork squares off of walls, repair cracks in plaster, pull up and replace cat pee soaked carpet, do landscaping, build a deck, enclose a back porch. Original 1923 coal furnace converted to gas probably in the 40’s still in place? We can replace that! It will cost extra though because it’s so damn heavy. God only knows what mixing cement in our basement utility sink did to our 60 + year old pipes. Thanks again furnace guys. Oh, and they left the door open and we had a squirrel living in the basement for a while chewing on who knows what…
There is a lot of emotion involved for both buyers and sellers. AsI have said before (see house warming) a home reflects who the owner is. How can you not love my house? Buyers find a home they love and see themselves living in it. Emotional commitment needs to happen before a financial commitment is made. That’s why agents are needed. This SHOULD be a mutually beneficial transaction. The seller has something to sell and the buyer should pay fair market value for it. Maybe the home is priced at fair market value for location, condition. Maybe there is room to negotiate. Letting a professional who isn’t emotionally involved help with one of the biggest purchasing, or selling, decisions makes sense.
We ended up selling our bungalow for about $25,000 more than we paid for it about 6 years later—much less than we put into it. Central air alone was about $10,000 (special install, we had hot water heat) but I was pregnant in the hottest summer I could ever recall (my “pregnancy memory” was probably a tad unreliable). Don would have paid anything to get me to stop crying. Priceless memories…those buyers should have paid more.
place to hang art 