Out of curiosity, I’ve always wondered what the rennovation/remodeling situation looks like in these types of markets with very low home prices. Do people just not fix up houses? Labor costs here in the SF Bay Area are sky high, but I would assume material costs are roughly the same across the country. I can’t imagine spending more on even a a modest remodel than a home is worth. Here, a bathroom remodel starts at like 10K on the low end.
On a related note, is there any new home construction going on in your town? If so, what does the new construction go for?
We moved to the Cotswolds, where everything is about £50k above those figures. And we are happy how cheap that is compared to Oxford prices, where we were before!
People buy, renovate and flip houses around here a lot. Due to the real estate crunch, there were a lot of foreclosures and short sales. A lot of people snapped them up and flipped them as the market began to recover. Although the people doing it were usually contractors themselves are as you said renovations are not cheap. As far as new construction, I haven’t really looked but the metro area has already been heavily urbanized so most new construction is likely a ways out of town.
Same here, it’s “Chase the millenials.” Shotgun houses that were $50k fifteen years ago are $250k now, provided it’s one of the three “hot” neighborhoods, and they aren’t good neighborhoods. Just traditionally poor areas with tiny shotgun houses and big doses of crime, but if the online zeitgeist says they’re desirable then here come the flippers and the artisanal popsicle restaurants. Then you go a mile in any direction and get twice the house for the same money.
120 year old shotgun house on 1/10th of an acre in a neighborhood that is just starting to gentrify. $247/ft.
We sold our house just outside Vancouver about four years ago and it had doubled in value in the four years we’d owned it. When we sold I told my wife, “We’ll never be able to afford to move back here.” It certainly looks like I was right.
Yeah, there are cities where the prices boggle the mind. Of course, I imagine that specific locations are key in many places. Then again, with the traffic in many big cities, who wants to drive in for two hours each way?
Yeah, people will definitely pay for proximity to whatever’s important. I had a 30 minute commute one year, and even that was disagreeable enough that I moved in closer to work at the earliest opportunity. Smaller place, and no back yard, but that seven minute walk to my office was totally worth it.
So we’re finally (hopefully) closing on our new house next week. The seller ended up asking for an extra couple of weeks to close due to challenges with moving cross-country.
We’re now entering the next phase: a few fixes to the new house before we move in, followed by the sale of our current house. We’re starting to get very stressed by the housing market. Still seems red-hot where we’re at (East Bay of the SF Bay Area), but interest rates are drifting up. Inventory is still super-low in our town, so we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to get this sold quickly and for a good price, but the process is a nail-biter.
For those who haven’t seen the skit, the SNL Zillow is hilarious, at least for folks like me and my wife, who are living this:
I just want to say, housing prices are crazy. We’re looking at some houses, and even just in the 2 years since we moved they are way up. One house that sold last in 2018 (when we moved here) that we looked at has gone up 26% since.
We also looked at some new construction. Hello starting at half a mil!
We had a serious conversation about selling our place the other day. It’s only a few years old, but the price has almost doubled since we bought it. But… The issue is the one @John_Doyle pointed out. We’d just be using the profit to buy our way into a bigger debt.
That’s what will hopefully happen with us—the current house, according to current market trends, has gone up substantially. But since the new house is in the same town, it went up just as substantially. We needed/wanted a new floor layout for various reasons, and remodel wasn’t going to get us there because of the partially sloped nature of our current lot.
But hell, we can’t take it with us and I’m not trying to leave the kids a big fortune or anything. Weird to see that our new mortgage won’t be paid until we’re 70+, if we stick to the full 30 years, but at a 2.5% interest rate, we’re not going to pay it down with the proceeds from the sale of the current house.
CraigM, most new construction in our town is starting around 2.5M!! Median price for sales in 2020 was over 2M. Ouch.
When I purchased this house just over a year ago, prior to the pandemic, I sold in the sellers market and bought in the buyer’s market. One was like an entry house, nice little house in an so-so area and this one is a nicer one in the school district everyone likes. Both these houses are marked at so, so much higher than they sold at in just 2 years.
I’ve been in just the beginning stages of looking to purchase a house since it looks like I might end up with enough for a down payment from my dad’s estate once all the dust settles.
The Seattle market is still crazy. The pickings are pretty slim for any house under $700k, unless you start getting quite a ways from the city. There are some new construction townhomes that are more affordable. Most condos are out since I really don’t want anyone living above or below me–something I think they’d appreciate as well with the piano.
I suggest reserving some funds for fixes and stuff—don’t buy so much house that you’re strapped and are only able to make the mortgage. Houses can have a lot of unexpected maintenance or just upgrades that you want to do.
On the flip side, I suggest not making any major changes to the house in the first few months. It’s amazing how your views on a house and what needs work (or doesn’t) changes after living in it a while.
I think you’re a bit younger than I am, and I did not get into IT until my 30s. While I dabbled with CS just my senior year for fun, I don’t have a tech background. I just wasn’t afraid to try new things so… it’s never too late and there is more than one way to enter in more than one industry.
As for housing, when I sold and purchased several houses had still not returned to their 2008ish peaks. I think some are just now.
Thank god, maybe now every other house won’t be a flip with the exact same grey laminate flooring, gray countertops, and gray paint. It’s painfully obvious in my market.
