The Washington, D.C. area is built around two-income families. The second income might be part-time or full-time, but it has to be there or else you’ll fall behind, because the price of everything is calibrated to households with two parents working.
We’re looking for a new house, and confirming the above statement. Desirable real estate is a finite commodity, and people are willing to pour increasing amounts of money into acquiring it. Ergo, prices are rising fast. Ergo, more mothers are pressured to go to work to pay the bills; a lot of the money they earn is then devoted to real estate; and the prices rise even higher.
Today we bid on a house, and lost. That’s okay — it was the first contract we wrote, and it can take several before you get one accepted. What’s crazy is not that we bid $10,000 more than the asking price, and the winning bid was $10,000 more. That is merely discouraging. The terrible thing is that of the four bids they were considering, ours was the only one that required an inspection.
“Why the italics, Eric? What is the big deal?” You wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive. And you would want a trusted mechanic to look the car over, right?
These folks are willing to take their chances with something 20 times as expencive. If the house has a bad roof, cracked foundation, or extensive water damage, you aren’t going to see that during an open house when the real estate agent is serving cider and cookies.
You could easily be stuck with $25,000 of damage, with no legal recourse. There are apparently a lot of kooky people out there who don’t see that as a problem. Their kookiness becomes our problem, because all else being equal, if they offer the same price as we’re offering, the sellers will choose the nutty no-inspection contract over ours.
This rant is not a cry for sympathy. I have confidence that God will help us find a place to live. Financially, we’re doing pretty well, mainly because we made a tidy profit on our previous house. My point — you were hoping I had one, if you’ve even read this far — is that people’s selfish choices make a big difference. If you choose to pursue your upscale lifestyles, it ratchets up the price for everyone else. (How the hell can a working-class family buy a house around here?) Next time you hear someone say, “What I do doesn’t affect anybody else,” you have my permission to smack them with a rolled-up real estate section.
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I see your point.
I’m 25, single, and live with 3 other guys in an old single-family home in a quiet neighborhood in College Park, Maryland.
Now, College Park natives HATE folks like me: the housing in their town has been largely overrun by renters, particularly college-aged or grad student-aged ones.
But the thing is, because most families locating to Prince George’s County want the newer, more expensive houses in newer communities away from the Beltway, there is hardly a market for residential buyers of the homes in CP. Add to that the housing crunch for University of Maryland students and the houses get snatched up by management companies that can make a nice profit off of renting out these houses.
Sure, there will still be instances where families lose out over landlords. But if more families were actually interested locating in College Park, I’m sure there’d be lesser instances of speculative landlords winning contracts since realtors would have an eye towards higher resale value years down the road. Absent homeowners tend to invest less in home improvements and such.
But oh well, it’s all good for me for the time being. I need a cheap place to live and it’s possible in College Park.
Eric:
You think YOU’VE got a problem? They’re building a new high-rise condo in the Clarendon section of Arlington (Virginia), right down the street from me. A one-bedroom will cost about two hundred grand. But you and I can both rest assured in the knowledge that the same unit in midtown Manhattan would cost over SIX hundred grand!
The problem is not just here at the cradle of civilization that is the East Coast. From 1950 to 2000, the average house in the USA doubled in size, and held half as many occupants.
Now, what’s that tell ya?
DLA
Requiring an inspection saved us from buying a house that would have been a disaster. I don’t see how anyone could waive that!