good grief buying a house is hard these days

[gbear]

If you've got a house to sell, now is the time!

My wife and I put a contract in for a house. OUr contract had an escalator clause up to 8k OVER the asking price. We were 20k below what the house went for. YIKES! The house in total was on the market for 2.5 days. There were 5 contracts. The one that got the house didn't even put in an escalator clause (I'd be mad if my agent made me pay 19K more than I had to). We had the second highest bid, and thought we were in good shape given pre aproval and the only thing we wanted was a house inspection. Evidently, that's not the case in this market.

Ah well, when we find a house, at least selling ours will be easy (buying not contingent on sale of our current house). Heck, the duplexs on either side of us went for mor ethan their asking prices too, and they went in less than 5 days too. In this market, why bother with a contingent contract...just plan on 1 or two months of double mortgages if you can get the credit.

It's just hard. Usually the asking price is where you start and move down. IT's an odd housing market here in DC.

[Symbol]

Good thing I'll be living at my house for at least the next 5 years. Good to have a contract. My work doesn't make enough where they can buy out my contract, so unless I get an offer from a college or higher, I'm not moving.

[The Wicked Wop]

Yeah we actually got lucky. We just got our place in December. It was actually the first house we looked at, and put a contract on it the next day. Fortunately we just went 5k over list and got. Really the clincher was we didn't ask for anything and put in a big earnest money deposit. Needless to say, the 2 months I was waiting to get in, were so stressfully worry that something would go wrong, and we lose our money. Fortunately it all worked out in the end.....but for damn sure, I'm not even thinking of moving again for a while.