House Hunting

I'm sitting around now waiting for my second house hunting appointment at 3.  Today seems to be crawling along at a snails pace and I am so ready to get on with this.

I found a mortgage guy I really like.  I got his good faith estimates, and amazingly, he does not appear to be trying to rip me off at all.  Actually, all my estimates improved drastically when I started taking control of the whole conversation.   Yeah, here's what I want, send me your good faith estimates.  If they're reasonable, we'll keep talking.   So now that the whole mortgage thing's out of the way, my stress level has decreased dramatically.

I looked at houses for the first time on Friday with my buyer's agent.  I use that term loosely, because as far as I can see, he's pretty useless other than securing appointments to look at houses.  I send him lists of MLS listings, and he takes me to see them.  He's never actually sent me a listing that has just hit the market that he thinks I might like.  I think I may actually know more than he does when it comes to how long the houses have been on the market and their price history.  Thank God for Realtor.com.  Really.

The houses that I looked at on Friday were horrible.  Two of them were in absolutely wretched, let's-just-tear-it-down-and start-over condition.  Original wiring.  Bad flooring.  Cracks in the ceiling.  And that's not even getting into any of the practical aspects like their complete and total lack of closet space. 

The other two were okay houses, but with really bad locations.  One was a cute victorian (hideously decorated on the inside) that was actually slightly above my price range that was across the street from condominiums that looked like they were one step away from becoming the projects.  The other house was smaller and very reasonably priced but that was definitely in the 'hood.

I chose this section of town to look in first because it is very convenient to where I work and where I go to school.  But now that I realize I have to double my price range to get a house that I would actually live in, I see that that area is out.

So today, I am going to look at houses that are still downtown, but a little further out.  I drove around and looked at them yesterday, and only one had a really iffy location (near some train tracks).   Much more respectable neighborhood.   All the online pictures look really good, but as I learned with the last batch of houses, that means absolutely NOTHING.

So, wish me luck.  I can't wait to get this whole process out of the way.