So, after years of waiting, a close brush with buying the house from “The Money Pit” a few years ago, and 20+ years of renting, my wife and I have joined the long list of Piggs who have recently come off the fence, jumped the shark, and nuked the fridge. Yes, we bought our first house.
We’d been passively looking for years, but stepped up our search a few months ago in our favorite neighborhoods of North Park, South Park, Hillcrest, University Heights, and Normal Heights. It seemed that all of the inventory in our range of 400-500 were either beaters or didn’t match some of our other criteria (3/2, walkable, modest yard, non-busy street, open layout). There were a lot of nice houses that could be amazing houses with a little bit of work, but with a 7-month old baby we were looking for something more turnkey.
I have a lesson for you home searchers out there. After churning through many handfuls of listings and open houses and not quite finding what we wanted, on a whim one night we decided to lower our once absolute requirement of 3 bedrooms down to 2 and to increase our max slightly to 520 just to see what was out there. As a self-employed home-office h4x0r the 3rd bedroom is a bit of a requirement as I need a dedicated office. So I wasn’t expecting to find anything. What we found was too good to be true: a mid-century modern home on a quiet street with a large yard at the south end of North Park. The only problem was that it was listed as a 2/2 and 20k more than our original max. However, it had a furnished basement not included in the bedroom count which would be perfect for an office! And while the price was a bit higher than we had wanted to pay, the house is about 200% better than anything we thought we could afford and 200% better than any of the houses we looked at under our supposed “absolute” requirements. It was a worthwhile value proposition for us. So my lesson to those home searchers out there who think that prices are still too high or there is crap inventory out there, be flexible with your parameters and you’ll find what you want. Or maybe we just got lucky. 🙂
I’ve got nothing but props for fellow Piggie Dan the urbanrealtor. He helped us through the entire process and it ended up being smoother than I had imagined. He went above and beyond for us many times, whether it was researching some obscure permit from the 1950s, helping us deal with contractors both pre & post sale, or going to bat for us against the seller’s agent. His knowledge of the urban core is impressive, giving out factoids of history about the various neighborhoods, streets, and houses along the way. Not to mention his handsomeness.
We fully expect our house to depreciate in the near future, but we’re in this for the long haul, and we’re not paying much more than we were for rent in a lesser house. We couldn’t be happier to have a beautiful new house to raise our beautiful new baby in!
So now that I have nothing else to say about real estate, it’s back to the Obama, religion, and socialism threads for me. Peace and hair grease!
