"100% of people who do not save money do not have any!"--Dave Ramsey

[JSH]

Originally Posted by Xist

There was another new posting, but it was a two-bedroom.

Any particular reason you aren’t looking at 2 bedroom houses? You can only sleep in one bedroom at a time.

Our house is a 3 bed / 1 bath but I would rather have a well laid out 2 bed / 2 bath with a larger kitchen / living room.

[Xist]

“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I asked Zillow if it could send me a video tour. A realtor named Dawn reached out to me.

Neither the Zillow employee nor Dawn specified that she lived in my area and for which company she worked. She had not looked up the property that interested me, either.

She asked for the address and then said "That house is okay, but have you seen this other house?!"

She is selling that one and I hardly looked at it before.

Zillow says that she has not had any sales in the last year. A Google search showed an article in the local paper from last year that described her as a "Dedicated office manager."

It sounds like she is new.

She doesn't have any reviews on Zillow.

This is an overhead view of her property:

The right shows how well a garage big enough to fit those two trucks would fit on that property.

They posted the house for sale in February for $200,000. They lowered it to $185,000 in early April and $175,000 in late April. If I asked the selling agent to offer $160,000, that would be in-line with how they would lower their asking price a third time, the realtor would receive almost double the commission that she would receive with the full asking price, and it would be her first commission in up to 12 months.

What if you had someone install a carport? I could have professionals pour concrete for the pad and a driveway and install an intersection roof like this:

I could do the framing, siding, insulation, and drywall myself, and have someone install the garage door.

Mom wanted to get out of the house, so we looked at the place in-town. She said that it looked worse in-person, but it was all right.

Between Zillow and Dawn I have six new e-mails, but all that I learned is that she got married last month.

[Xist]

JSH, I would want to move the family into my house while I fix up Mom's, and projects take me a while, but hopefully hemorrhaging money would be a motivating factor.

[redpoint5]

No, hemorrhaging money isn't a strategy for success, it's a strategy for hemorrhaging money. If you're not fixing up the house while you live in it, you're certainly not fixing it up when you aren't confronted by it constantly.

I'd live with my folks so long as I wasn't pursuing a family of my own because it saves a ton of money and we mutually benefit each other. My 20 year old GF thought it immature of me at 22 to still be living with them. Both my parents were around though, and my sister didn't have special needs. That girlfriend only had a mom though, and her young brother was severely autistic. She achieved her goal of becoming a nurse and is married with children now. Ran into her in a barn dance in my small town recently, which was exciting and tough at the same time. Not regretful kind of tough, just my feelings towards people never change despite a change in relationship status.

[Xist]

I really do not want to fix the drywall and texture while we live here, let alone paint.

[oil pan 4]

A Realtors prime directive is to sell you the house that makes them the most money. Make your interests known and that you are not willing to diverge from what you want to what they think you can afford.
If you tell them you can only afford 200,000 then you probably won't see any houses much under 200,000 until they get desperate and until then they will be pushing you towards the 250,000 to 285,000 dollar homes.
When they push you the higher dollar home don't say "I can't afford that", its suggestive. Say "I already know I'm not approved for that much", a little more absolute.

Originally Posted by redpoint5

No, hemorrhaging money isn't a strategy for success,

Unless you're the US government.

[Xist]

This lady isn't aggressive at all. I am tempted to find out which realtor sold the most houses last year because that person clearly gets things done, but were they in the interest of the client or the realtor?

I will represent my own interests, at least for now.

In unrelated news, some guy on Reddit paid off a little over $10,00 in debt at 18% interest and then freaked out because it depleted his emergency funds. So far everyone told him that he did the right thing. Someone compared it to making an 18% investment.

I spent hours today looking up addresses on Zillow. There should be ten or twenty houses in my price range that were taken off the market.

"Hey Bob, I know that we decided to wait out TPgate, but someone just offered full asking price. He just wants a video tour. What should I tell him?"

[Ecky]

Originally Posted by Xist

I really do not want to fix the drywall and texture while we live here, let alone paint.

That has been literally every room in my house. Different strokes for different folks. I sure as heck wouldn't drive here to fix this place up if I weren't living in it, but our situations are different.

[Xist]

I am trying to find somewhere close.
I found a list of 4,905 addresses in Show Low--in all caps. I put them in one document (in Title Caps) and figured out how to change each address into a Google search for it.
Only a couple of houses had more than a couple (If any) pictures. When a house does have pictures I check the history, but nothing was recently taken off of the market.
I have found 88 mobile homes so far and 87 bad addresses, while it seems like there are houses in the area, they just have different numbers.
It is outside of city limits, so they are going to have propane, septic, dirt roads, and probably a mobile home.
Hopefully they are more accurate in-town
I just wish they didn't waste my time with bad addresses, but it was free!
I would click on all of the addresses on a screen and then see if the addresses were good, if there was a mobile home, and if there was an HOA.
It was tedious before Google cut me off, but I had dozens of tabs open, and the only way to figure out which addresses I had not checked yet was to pull it out of the URL.
I typed those directly into Zillow. I could not convert the Google searches into Zillow ones because Zillow puts the MLS number in the web address or something. Also, it is entirely possible that I am the first person to want to use Zillow in my search box.
I could not find any directions for it, so I typed in many addresses.
Those 4,905 addresses take up 103 pages and I completed 6.
I hope that everybody enjoyed their Sunday more than I did!

[JSH]

Originally Posted by Xist

This lady isn't aggressive at all. I am tempted to find out which realtor sold the most houses last year because that person clearly gets things done, but were they in the interest of the client or the realtor?

I will represent my own interests, at least for now.?"

It is in the financial interest of both Realtors to sell the house at the highest price that can be negotiated. They both are paid a percentage of selling price. The lower the buyer’s agent negotiates the price the less they make.

That said their chief concern tends to be speed. They want the deal to close ASAP with the minimum amount of hassle.