first time home buyer city advice

[Oildog]

Did you look at West St Paul, near the river. Many affordable places there with decent freeway access.

[BillyB]

I'd look around Como Park / Roseville

[elani]

There are still some deals in NE Minneapolis. My husband and I just bought our first house there for around $110,000, and it's a 3br in great shape, near a park and public transit. We had to wade through a lot of pretty awful places in that price range before we found that one, though. We lucked out with our realtor being a no-BS kind of guy who was willing to hit 15 or 20 places a day so we could do that effectively. If I had to do it again, I think I'd take that same approach. It's just too hard to tell from the listings which places are going to be worth the time.

We were first-time buyers too...so here are a few things we found out the hard way:
-Sellers are still willing to negotiate closing costs, but there are some "gotchas", particularly if you do an FHA loan (we had no clue about this beforehand, but FHA loans apparently have higher closing costs, so we were only able to get the seller to cover half of ours -- 3% of the sale price.)
-Before you do anything at all I recommend getting your records (bank statements, pay stubs, etc.) in order and triple-checking your credit report. We have pretty good credit ourselves and had a cosigner with a credit score of 800 on top of that and it was still difficult to get approved for a loan.
-They'll probably take a microscope to every time in the last nine months anyone has pulled your credit for any reason, so be ready for that, especially if you shop around for pre-approvals. They started interrogating us about that one day before closing, and it was very stressful.
-Don't ignore the listings that don't have a lot of information. The house we ended up buying didn't have much info or even any interior pictures posted, but if we'd passed over it in favor of the better-marketed ones, we'd have missed a great deal.
-If you find a good place at a good price, be prepared to make an offer immediately -- even in this market there's competition for the best deals.

And don't forget the first-time homebuyer credit! If you need the cash, I think I heard the IRS was trying to find ways for people to apply it to their 2008 taxes and get the refund this year, even if they bought after April 15th. It's worth looking into.

Good luck!

[Camden Northsider]

Originally Posted by Levon

Good point on the suburb myth.

3bed, 2garage, prefer 2 bath but would settle for a 1 bath. Public transportation isn't that important for me, but I can see myself getting a roommate so that might be an issue for a potential roommate.

Lakes, river, parks not that big of a need for me. As for entertainment, I would like an area with people my age (mid 20's)

As for price range I haven't talked to a mortgage broker yet so I'm not sure what I can qualify for. My credit score is excellent but I'm still young, single (no double income), and new to this whole home buying scene so I'm clueless as to what price range I could qualify for. My ballpark guess price is around 160k. As for down payment I have a good chunk saved for that.

Now a friend of mine just bought a house and he was able to get the seller to pay the closing costs. Is this normal with the market being bad right now or is this a rare thing?

Hopefully this helps. Thank you for all the imput!

2 car garages tend to be the standard in my neighborhood in Minneapolis proper (there are actually 3 homes within a block on my alley that have 3 car garages) - it's actually probably a lot easier to find a lowball-priced home with a 2 car garage around here then it is to find one with 2 baths. There are similarly a lot of twenty-somethings in the neighborhood and a fair amount of recent college grads, but they tend to be more of the cohabitating/ married couples and/or young families (as for entertainment, there's a couple restaurant/bar combos close by, but otherwise you'd have to go to other city/ suburban areas). Interestingly enough, there are parts of Camden that IMO feel more suburban than urban, I know my n'hood is probably quieter than many of the surrounding suburbs. And there are now 22 neighborhoods in Minneapolis that qualify for the Minneapolis Advantage Program - it just got a huge surge in funding so they opened it up to a lot more neighborhoods this time around - basically it's a free $10,000 towards a home (this is totally separate from the tax credit) if you plan on owning/ occupying for 5 years. Areas that have had a fair amount of foreclosures are eligible for the program, although it doesn't really correlate so much to how many "vacants" are in a neighborhood (except that the hardest hit areas tend to have more funding and sometimes matching dollars), but rather how many foreclosures a neighborhood has had (so there are n'hoods with pretty low amts of vacant/ condemned, e.g. where the foreclosures have fairly quickly turned over, that still qualify). Good luck-

[Levon]

Thanks elani for sharing your story. I've been skipping all the online listings that dont have interior pictures, but from now on I'm going to start giving them some more thought.