Home Buying Recommendations

[2centsworth]

My wife and I purchased a Ryland and we're very happy with it. Ryland and home builders like them Pay real estate agents 3% of the sales price for new customers. This 3% doesn't affect what you pay whatsoever! The beauty is if you can find a Real Estate Agent who will give you 1% rebate, so on a $180k purchase you get $1800 cash back.

If you need a Real Estate agent who will do that I know a couple who will.

[Mijo]

Somebody want to enlighten me on the 60 minutes show about Pulte? (Not that we're gonna change now, I'm just curious). Our foundation should be solid... they had to carve the garage space out of solid rock.

Grandview is nice. We did the geotechnical study and made the reccomendations for the slab design.

[CrazyOne]

Interesting, Mijo. You'll have to tell me more about what that means sometime.

[Mijo]

It basically means that I study "dirt". Different types of soils require warrant different slab designs. Building in clay soils requires deeper beams and building in rock usually requires just the opposite. In a nuts .

[Nbadan]

So put your life on hold indefinitely while paying someone else's mortgage for something you will never own and speculate the out the market while watching interest rates climb. A 2 or even 3 point hike in interest rates will totally wipe out (and then some) over the life of the mortgage a couple of grand an anxious seller will knock off their selling price.

If I were worried about rising interest rates, the only thing that would make me want to wait it out is if I were paying cash for a house.

I never said anything about speculating the market. In fact, if we attack Iran after March 28th, as expected, the market could take a good sized plunge. Better to just keep your money in safe investments and live off of the cheap rent that will be available in SA for newer homes for the next few years. Better yet, buy commodities, Gold and Palladium.

I think prices will drop more than 'a couple of grand'. Try between 10-20%, maybe closer to the lower end in SA where demand is still decent from recent immigrants from Mexico and the opening of Toyota and such, but there will still be a drop. On a $185K home, you could save about $15k, maybe more, it depends on how desperate sellers get. Cash will rule, and the drop in home prices and a good sized down-payment will more than off-set any increase in interest rates (at least from a new buyer fixed morgage point-of-view).

[Nbadan]

POP goes the housing-bubble, just as I predicted...

Sales of new U.S. homes plunged 10.5 percent in February, the biggest drop in nearly nine years, while prices fell and the number of homes on the market hit a record high, the government said on Friday in a report signaling significant slowing in the housing market.

<snip>

Economists, however, widely expect the housing market to weaken throughout 2006

Reuters

[SpursWoman]

Speculating is about all you are doing when you're talking about anything in the future ... from interest rates to new house builds or not builds to what percentage of the population took out ARM loans and will choke on them. Nothing is a certainty until it actually happens. And as long as you're paying someone else for a home that you are not building any equity in, regardless of how cheap the rent may or not be ... you're really not doing yourself any favors, IMHO.

Sales of new U.S. homes plunged 10.5 percent in February,

Maybe more people are just buying Previously Lived In Homes.

[Kori Ellis]

My wife and I purchased a Ryland and we're very happy with it. Ryland and home builders like them Pay real estate agents 3% of the sales price for new customers. This 3% doesn't affect what you pay whatsoever! The beauty is if you can find a Real Estate Agent who will give you 1% rebate, so on a $180k purchase you get $1800 cash back.

If you need a Real Estate agent who will do that I know a couple who will.

Your house is beautiful.

[Vashner]

All the stats and panic is just the libs hoping the market goes bad. Which is kinda stupid and sick if you think about it (sitting around praying for bad news).

Bottom line.. life is good. Interest rates are still good and the quality has never been better. If anything looming bubble issues are a reason to close on a fixed apr now.