How long before you wanted to buy did you look?

[Jacklynn]

So Matt and I are looking to buy somewhere around August/September.

I don't want to look too early because I don't want to keep having houses bought that I have an eye on before we are able to purchase one. But I want to look far enough out that we can close as close to September as we can (though I know that it all depends on various variables).

For those of you who own homes, when did you start looking verses when you closed? How long was it before you started to seriously look, as in tour the inside, get an inspection and put in a bid before closing?

[Gertie]

A realtor in your area might have a better feel for how things are going in your area for houses of the type you want. When we bought our house just almost five years ago, we looked for about four months and it took about three weeks to close on the house, mostly because it took that long for us to pull our money out of our investments. We made the choice to pay cash for a house we found that had been repossesed that needed lots of work rather than buy a nicer house and pay a lot of interest to a bank for the loan. I am really not sorry we did that, even though sometimes it gets tiring doing all the work ourselves, but it wouldn't be the choice for everyone. Then too, we got really lucky on the location - the house is right across the street from the most coveted elementary in town, so now that a lot of the work is done, it's worth a lot more than we have invested in it. Unless you count all the blood sweat and tears we've got invested in here, too! LOL

[Danielle9608]

August - September is still a long ways away in real estate world. I would defiantly suggest waiting to look. You don't want to fall in love with something now. Plus the market could change a lot between now and then. We closed on our house in March of 2007. We started looking in Nov or Dec. It took us some time to find our house. We also had put in an offer to a place that didn't end up working out. I would say it's safe to start looking 60-90 days before you actually intend to buy. Good luck that is so exciting!!

PS. One more word of advice. Have you preapproval letter in hand when you actually do start looking. We made the mistake of going to opening houses before we had a preapproval letter. We fell in love with one and scrambled to get the paperwork done in time, but we were too late and someone bet us to putting in an offer. Also it can't hurt to have more then one preapproval. At least for us it saved us when it was time to actually apply for the mortage.

[Jacobs_Girl]

We started looking on and off last year! We didnt get our pre-quailified letter until a few months ago and we had been looking hardcore.

We found 2 houses we really liked and put bids on them. The first one the seller wouldnt budge and the second one we got outbidded at the last minute.

I think it is totally fine you start looking now. We saw so many houses and we didnt know what we wanted until we saw what we didnt want. If you know what I mean lol

So a year later we still dont have a house. Be prepared to compromise, be disaapointed and excited, stressed, etc etc

I never knew how stressful house hunting could be. Staying in your price range, the area you like,the amenities you like. etc etc

[KristinGriffin]

I'd actually recommend taking a look at houses now. While I'm not a realtor, we live in MA and started looking for our house about 9 months before we bought. It really helped, since we started looking WAY too low. Optimistically, we thought we could buy under $100,000, and while there were houses on the market for that price, which looked good on paper and on websites, when we visited them, we realized they were more fixer-upers than we wanted to deal with. We eventually increased our search by quite a bit and learned a lot in the initial stages. It also gave us time to really work out a budget, find decent contractors and determine what sort of renovating we could tackle ourselves.

I can understand your desire to wait, since you don't want to get your heart set on anything, but remember, this is truly a buyer's market - there will probably be plenty of comparable houses (maybe even the same ones) still on the market in August. If you're concerned, contact a realtor in your area, tell them your situation and ask about the market. They'd probably be happy to show you a few houses now anyways, and can keep you updated about new listings that you may be interested in. Plus working with them now will help them really learn about your needs, so hopefully you will end up in the best house for you. Real Estate should never be an impulse buy - I'd say start slowly now. No need to go crazy, but take a few Saturdays/Sundays and visit some open houses to educate yourselves.

[NurseLau84]

We got the prequal letter in October, started looking in November 2007, found our house in early January 2008....closed on Feb 26, 2008!

[Jacklynn]

Our only issue is we are paying off some (okay A LOT) of credit card debt. As in we will be paying off a little over $10,000 between now and August. We are starting a super aggressive payment plan on them. Thankfully we can now afford to pay off about $1,300 a month, and will be getting a $4,800 bonus at the start of August. (we had to live off of credit cards for a year while we were still full time students, we had to put some tuition on credit cards that we found out about last minute... and then we moved across the country on them). We will be able to pay them off by August 31st, but it will take the full amount of time, and a lot of action on our part.

The thing is, we don't want to try to get preapproved until it is at least half gone, because we know we won't be approved, or at least for much with that much immediate debt in our names. By May that debt will be down to about 8 grand... but we probably shouldn't start putting our name out there for a loan until at least July.

So we need to wait a few months before getting approved, which is unfortunately the first step. So we probably won't try to get preapproved until the end of July start of August. So we will probably kinda look around lightly (so we don't get disappointed when we see something we like, only to know we can't get a loan for it for a few months) and look aggressively in August.

Bleh, just wish it was August already!

[BarceloMayaPalaceBride]

Our process went really quickly. We found a home we liked and closed on it within' 2 weeks!!! :) I love our little house!

[SerendipityCrafts]

If you aren't prone to your emotions getting the best of you .... it wouldn't be a bad idea to get out and have a look now. Not to buy mind you but, just to see what is out there, what kind of prices you are look at and also to get a feel for neighbourhoods etc. Maybe do some open houses on Sundays?

DH was looking online for more than a year but photos NEVER tell the full story. Most all homes are crappier than the photos tell :) We got a much better idea of what we liked and didn't by visiting the houses.

When we did find this place, we came back for an open house and then another time besides. We put in our offer in August with a close date of October.

[Jacklynn]

If you aren't prone to your emotions getting the best of you .... it wouldn't be a bad idea to get out and have a look now. Not to buy mind you but, just to see what is out there, what kind of prices you are look at and also to get a feel for neighbourhoods etc. Maybe do some open houses on Sundays?

hehe sadly I AM prone to letting my emotions get the best of me :) I'll keep finding houses that I love before we can apply for a loan, and then keep getting depressed that I WILL NEVER find another house that I will ever love that much ever again.... hehe though I know that isn't true, sometimes emotions do play me like that ;)

Which is why it is probably best for me to not log onto any real estate website until at least late July-- why oh why does that seems so far away!

[MrsDM]

Oh I am full of house advice lately!! We bought our little apartment-like condo 2 years ago. It was a great idea because we were able to start gaining equity, but not be strapped for cash. By this last summer, we were more than ready to own a home.

We put our condo on the market in October and looked at houses, put an offer in on maybe the 4th or 5th, and lost that offer to another bidder. Fast forward 3 months, our condo sold and we found a house of which we thought we loved. Went to get the house inspected and it unleashed all kinds of things. We wasted about 2 weeks just trying to get out of the contract. For the whole story my house hunting journal is here: http://forums.onewed.com/showthread.php?t=23452 On this house, this was probably the 12th house we looked at and were set to close at the end of March as well.

So, here we are 1 month 2 days away from the buyer's closing on our condo and we still don't have a house.

My advice is give yourselves enough time and be prepared for anything. The closing aspect is negotiable. We had an accepted offer on our condo mid-January and they wanted to close at the end of March. I thank God now because we don't have a place to live right now!

Honestly, start looking maybe June. Remember, you don't have to sell anything so you can have an accepted offer for two months, just like we did and the seller's will just have to wait until you are ready to close. Because you have no contingencies, you are every seller's dream! My other suggestion is get pre-approved soon through about 3 different lenders. We opted for going through a mortgage company versus a bank, as they were able to give us the most competitive rates. Plus, you don't want to be stucked dealing with somebody who you can't get along with, and trust me, your realtor and loan officer will be your new best friends from the date you start looking, until the closing date!!

If you have any questions, feel free to PM me :)

[SerendipityCrafts]

hehe sadly I AM prone to letting my emotions get the best of me :) I'll keep finding houses that I love before we can apply for a loan, and then keep getting depressed that I WILL NEVER find another house that I will ever love that much ever again....

DH kept showing me listings and I kept telling him to stop it! :) Just keep it in mind that your house isn't even on the market yet.

[Jacklynn]

Oh I am full of house advice lately!!

Wow thanks for all of your advice!! We can't really get pre-approved until at least July/August because that is when our crazy credit card debt will be almost gone. It will be pointless for us to do it before then.

Thankfully my job provides an apartment, and we will have it through May 2010. BUT our apartment is also where I work... as in I work in a dorm filled with high school girls and even with I am "off duty" I can still hear everything going on, and we have to go through the dorm to get out of it... we have no private exit/entrance. So we want to buy while the market is good for buyers, and give us a place to go when I am off duty. We don't pay for housing now, so after our credit cards are paid off, we will have an "extra" $1,200 a month that we were paying on CC, that we might as well put towards a house so we can start paying on it.

So all of that to say, that if worse comes to worse and it ends up dragging on, we have housing until AT LEAST May 2010. They have already asked me back for next year. So thankfully we don't have to deal with a short time constriction. So we have August- May to close. The sooner the better :)

[adrianna918]

we started looking casually online for months. finally in December i got a hold of a realtor and told her we were looking to buy around May or June and she said it was not too early too look. It gave us time to get out there, she was was on the market in the area. Turns out we found something we liked last month, before we were expecting to buy. We are going to close earlier then we thought but its worth it for our perfect house!

[BingBot]

Do you know what city you want to buy a home in? DH and I are hoping to buy a home sometime this year as long as everything works out. We had about 4 different suburbs we were interested in, so we have been finding some nice homes online in those suburbs and doing "drive bys". We check out the street, neighborhood, and anything we can see on the outside of the house like the driveway, yard, and proximity to other houses. It does really help! We have actually eliminated one suburb from our list from doing this, so now we are down to 3 we are interested in.

We haven't gone to any open houses yet, and probably won't for a couple of months. But there are PLENTY of things that you can do before you actually go to the open houses. Figure out your price range, find out the specific area where you want to live, make a list of everything that you want in a house, research mortgages and current rates, and learn all that you can about the home buying process! Do those things now, and it will be August before you know it - and you will feel very prepared to buy a house! I know that looking online isn't the same, but I would still recommend it at this point, that's what we are doing. It gives you a good idea of what is out there and what you can get in your price range!

[Whitewater]

We started looking casually in October of 2007, late, like, around Halloween. When we finally decided to get serious, we got our pre-approval right about Thanksgiving, and started to look for houses a couple weeks before Christmas.

We changed realtors in early January, 2008.

Somewhere between 40-50 houses later (three of which we'd put offers on, the rest we'd gone and seen and said 'No, thank you!' to . . .*man* that is a lot of real estate to look at, ugh), we finally found *our* house. It was literally the last house we saw. We put our offer in sometime in late April, I want to say, because there was still snow on the ground.

And we closed on June 9th, 2008 and started the renovations, and moved in on June 14th, 2008.

So, we spent about 2 months just getting a feel for what we wanted and where we wanted to live (neighborhoods and so on), then we spent 6 months actually trying to find and buy a house.

So far, those six months have been the worst and most stressful of my entire life. Seriously. They were even more stressful than the days when my first marriage was ending. My blood pressure went up to 170/95. House hunting is not for the faint of heart!!!

We had amazing setbacks, heartbreaking news, and some pretty dizzying swings and highs and lows throughout that six months. We had one house literally get snatched out from under us -- they'd accepted an offer three hours earlier -- and one that was about to fall apart, though it didn't look like it from the outside. We managed to get our earnest money back on it because it would never have passed an inspection, and the bank selling the property was doing some highly illegal things . . . needless to say, Fiance and I were both just stressed out, and even when we got an accepted offer, the **** didn't stop. Good news, bad news, sometimes within hours of each other, frantically fixing things, desperate praying, having our realtor and our loan officer on speed dial . . .and the best part, the MORNING OF THE CLOSING (did you get that?) we were frantically (notice how often I use this word) trying to get documentation that our loan officer called and asked for using this phrase -- "Oh, by the way" . . .

Buying a house is fraught. Just, fraught. My advice is to have or develop nerves of steel and a ruthlessly non-emotional business instinct, and when you cry (not if), do it where nobody can see you and take advantage of your weakness. Because seriously, the home buying process is like jumping into a shark tank in your underwear, wearing a necklace of raw steaks.

The only good thing I can say is that it's absolutely worth it. All of it. No matter what it might feel like halfway through. Owning our own home has surpassed my wildest dreams. It's that good.


Whitewater