Random Acts of Mind by Dones

We went (serious) house-hunting last Sunday for the first time since before we got married.  We’re not to the point of making any offers yet; we want to get an offer or two for our house before committing to buying one, even if we’re talking about making the contract contingent on the sale of our home. Our house has only been on the market 10 days, and we just had pictures taken yesterday for the website. 

Nevertheless, we are checking out the websites every day for new homes in the Olathe/Johnson County area that are between $100K and $150K…and pickings are sorta slim. Not as slim as in Lawrence, where we currently live (which is good for our sale, I think), but there are a lot of older homes that have quirks such as:

• It’s located right on a major throroughfare. We don’t expect our kids to be able to play in the street, but we’d like to be able to back out of our driveway during morning rush hour. Or better yet, not live on a street with a ‘rush hour’.
• The ‘master bedroom’ doesn’t have an attached bathroom. Something about not sharing a bathroom with kids & guests just happens to appeal to us, especially given our experience in our current single-bathroom townhome.
• The kitchen is small and/or needs updating.  If it weren’t so expensive to update countertops and cabinets, this wouldn’t be as big of a deal. We may be able to live with drab yellow textured counters, but eventually the people we sell the house to will probably prefer something different.
• It’s in a shabby neighborhood.  Call us snobs, but we’d like to live in a neighborhood where everybody takes good care of their homes. HOAs and cookie-cutter manicured lawns are the opposite extreme, however, and thankfully those neighborhoods price themselves out of our league.
• No seller disclosure.  A foreclosure being sold ‘as-is’ may not always be a red flag, but considering that I am not as handy as my father, and he’s not only 60 years old but in Indiana–well, I just can’t necessarily take care of something that needs to be fixed or goes wrong at 2am on a Monday morning without getting professional help. So unless we get desperate, we’re excluding this type of home from our searches.

Then there’s the category of ‘this house would normally be worth $175K or more, but due to it having something very wrong with X and/or Y (etc.) it is now in our price range’.  Yikes. No thanks. I’d rather have a smaller intact house than a larger piece of crap.

One of the bits of hope I see is that we are selling our home for a respectably high price in a market that has very few properties for sale in competition with us.  Then we’re moving to what may be considered a buyer’s market.  So we should get a fairly decent price for selling our home, and we may be able to get some nice concessions from a seller in Johnson County. We’ll see though…it seems everyone has their own opinion on the state of the housing market, and it’s hard to know to whom we should listen.  Obviously the folks in the business have an interest in keeping the market hot, while almost everyone else has a negative view of the market. The good news is we don’t really need to move, nor if we happen to sell do we need to buy right awaw; we’ve been talking about the contingency of renting and finding a temporary home for our cats in the event that our house sells and we can’t find a home that we want to buy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 12:32 pm and is filed under House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.