[Mariza160]

Originally Posted by Tek_Freek

And the feeding frenzy continues. Please stop responding.

Oh come on...we wanna see the tax return... it's the American way !

[OmegaSupreme]

Originally Posted by Tek_Freek

How does a Costco come across as snobbish? We go to the one at 215 and Charleston and have never felt that it is. Some of the nicest people work there.

Or are you commenting on the Summerlin attitude so many have about that area of LV?

I think you'd have to be a snob to understand.

[Tek_Freek]

Originally Posted by OmegaSupreme

I think you'd have to be a snob to understand.

Verrry interesting!

[Code Stemi]

Originally Posted by Willy702

You have a million dollar down payment but you can't leave a city you absolutely hate for 3 years? Umm ok

Yeah, answer that Mr Jonathan.

[airics]

Originally Posted by chahunt

Yeah, answer that Mr Jonathan.

next he'll say its tied up in certificates of deposits or mutual funds...

[Tek_Freek]

Tesla stock.

[JonathanLB]

3 years?! First of all, no, nobody said 3 years. I'm hoping next year. It could be as soon as spring 2019 but more likely end of next year. I'm sure this is probably tough for you to understand, but other people have vastly more complicated financial situations than you do, and I don't say that in a condescending way at all, I just mean it's not so black and white.

I think it would be a mistake to get into my personal finances on a public forum, to be honest with you. I am trying to find the best way to give you the gist of it while still being vague, though. My holdings are all in commercial real estate (think apartment buildings, office high rise, office park, senior living), they are all fractional holdings (2% to 12%), thus I don't control the assets and only am along for the ride. Several of those assets are on the market for sale and that is expected to close by the end of the year. There is a chance the owner doesn't like the bids, decides not to sell, and that will delay my move. I would consider that chance remote, maybe 10%.

The reason "we" are planning to move in more like a year is because of my fiancé. She would prefer we move after we get married next September, I'd prefer we move ASAP like yesterday is not too soon if you ask me. :P But in a relationship as I'm sure you guys understand, you have to be considerate of the other person's wishes too. She's very close to her mom and her 8-year-old brother, which I can understand, so moving will be for her a trade-off. She doesn't like this city either, she is excited to move, but she does love spending time with her family. For me, it's easier. I have my dad here, who travels about 6 months per year, and he has the means to visit me, to go on vacations with me, and I have the means to go visit him easier, too. In fact my fiancé wasn't even on board with a move before I turn 40 (4 years from now) until I said I'd pay for a roundtrip for her to visit her family every month. That was our compromise.

There is also the fact that we enjoy our house here, even if we don't enjoy the city, which is to say we love the setup that we have with our home gym, with our great entertainment area, with two bedrooms and two offices, and there's no way we'd trade the lifestyle we already have for something less than that. As much as Las Vegas is a better city, your experience in any city is going to be affected by your personal living arrangement. I don't care how great the city for instance, if you're living in the ghetto with two roommates, you're probably going to dislike your lifestyle. I'm being dramatic obviously for making a point, but the vast majority of homes we have seen certainly don't have space for gym equipment, 4 bedrooms, and an entertainment room (all of which we already have here) and also the separation between the bedrooms and the fun space(s). And that's with a budget range up to $1.5M. You can still find houses at that cost that you'd have no place to put your fitness equipment except the living room, literally. I'm by no means saying these aren't great, nice, luxury homes that would work for many people. They just don't work for us. People get so focused on, "Well you're too picky," they don't stop to answer the question, "Why would we move to a house that's not as good as our $600K house for more than twice the price in a cheaper real estate market?" Nobody would do that. Literally, nobody. It would be lunacy. So I'd rather be patient and buy the house that works for us just as well or better than our present house. That's a reasonable thing to do.

[movin1]

Good luck finding the perfect house. You should find a lot in a location you like and build a custom home so you get what you want.

It's the only thing that made sense for us 3 times. We had 3 custom homes built in different locations as we moved around trying to find where we wanted to live. We got lucky when we moved to Vegas and found something that was close enough.

When you build custom, you don't have wasted space (we have a lot of that now, way more square feet than we need and a lot of it useless). You figure out what you want, how many rooms, basic layout and concept, and the dimensions of each room. You see how many square feet you need. Floor plan is everything.

[JonathanLB]

That's so true, our house now is only 2,800 square feet! It's larger than average but not by much. Safe to say that if my GF and I didn't both run our own businesses, we wouldn't need home offices, but I've run my company remotely for 10 years now and overall it's nice working from home. I'm pretty flexible though, like we want two bedrooms so there's a guest bedroom or I can sleep in the other room if I'm up late working / she needs to get up earlier (she's a photographer) but I wouldn't be opposed to putting my home office in the guest bedroom if there were two masters or a larger second bedroom than average for instance. I'd also consider putting the gym equipment in a garage (we've seen houses with a 2 car and 1 car garage very commonly at this budget level) and installing a ductless mini split in the garage for AC or something along those lines. There are flexible ways to make things work, and I'll consider them all, it just has to be a house that somehow makes sense.

Ideally, of course I'd love to build custom, but the Vegas market is so crazy right now and even two years ago the Review Journal ran a piece about how $2M was the starting point for custom homes. It's definitely true if you build custom there is less wasted space, though. The use of space in most of these layouts I have seen is absolutely horrible. There is plenty of square footage for everything, but the way it's divided is always almost 100% of the time designed for large families and not entertainment or fun. I spent a bunch of time just for fun sketching out a single story custom home shaped like a U almost where there was space for a large home gym, home theater, entertainment room, two master bedrooms, a guest bedroom, and two offices plus the living room / kitchen area and it was 4,400 square feet. Now, in actual reality, any home I've seen at 4,400 square feet has no home gym, no home theater, no two masters, and often not even a guest bedroom. It's literally some unnecessarily large master combined with a way-too-big kitchen / living room area nobody would use often, and a bunch of other awkward wasted space. I'm not convinced any of these people understand how a house should be designed. It's baffling.

Then again it says enough about the mentality of these builders that $1M+ homes in a desert aren't made out of insulated concrete form, which they all should be, at any budget really, because that's the best way to insulate a home against heat / cold and noise / bugs. ICF isn't even expensive, it doesn't add almost anything to the price of building a home, they just don't understand how to do it. One day when my budget is much larger, I want a custom glass, steel, and concrete modern home with not an ounce of wood anywhere but on the floors :P

[movin1]

Years ago when we thought about moving out here we met with Blue Heron and asked if they could build us a small home for $600K. They said yes, but it would be under 2,000 sq feet. At the time we thought $300/sq foot was too much and we needed a bigger house. I have lived in 2,800 sq foot house with a full finished basement and a 1,300 sq feet condo in downtown Chicago. Our furniture was too big for the master bedroom in the condo, but other than that, it was totally livable. We never used an architect, I found floor plans and the builders modified them to my specifications in two of the homes we had built. Not sure how expensive it is to do a basement here or if it is even possible. I have seen some two story homes built in the sides of mountains that have the feel of lower levels (main level of house is on the same plane as the road and driveway). Lots of options to get what you want and not waste space.