kev, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think you should stay out on the street in your favorite haunts in Brea, Buena Park, Yorba Linda and Fullterton (as you have mentioned here before) with a pen and offer form in your hand and/or your agent chained to your ankle with offer-forms in his/her hand. Keep a few counter-offer forms in your back pocket, too. And put your inspector’s and engineer’s number in your cell phone so you can possibly get an appointment with them BEFORE you make an offer or immediately upon acceptance. Then your offer will have less contingencies going forward. If done before, you might lose $250-$400 if you decide not to make an offer, but if you did get an accepted offer on the same property, you wasted both time and money. And your offer will be written WITHOUT an inspection contingency. That’s a HUGE PLUS in traditional sale offers.
You have ostensibly been “shopping” for a home for several months now (a year?) in very established areas all the while prices were ticking up. Don’t let all this interest-rate noise bother you. No one knows if prices will continue to tick up, and, in any case, the effect of higher MIRs all depends on the level of desirability of the micro markets you are shopping in. If you can no longer qualify to buy anything in some or all of your 4 fav markets (above) due to recent MIR hikes, then you need to begin making offers in adjacent areas/cities which you CAN afford OR shop properties with less square feet than you were previously looking at.
Based upon your previous threads and posts here, I just feel that if you were really serious, you could have bought a place by now.
If you continue to keep wishing and hoping prices will come down steeply or come down at all in areas which you are not currently qualified to buy in … or only marginally qualified to buy in where you have to compete with better-qualified buyers, you will find yourself a perpetual renter, IMHO.
My two cents. And I’m no pollyanna, just a realist. About as “real” as you can get … Based upon your prior posts I just see you being able to buy a place if you really wanted one. That’s a question only you can answer.
