How do I know that I am on the priority list?

[oregonwoodsmoke]

Why are you asking me? I have no knowledge of any list. Go back to the sales staff and ask them to check and make sure your name got onto the priority list.

Builders like to have a list of buyers all waiting for a unit as it is build. There is no motivation to leave you off of the list. If you are not on the list, someone made a clerical error. That is why you check to make sure you made it onto the list.

You are aware, I hope, that the price will probably be higher next year. Cost of everything is going up steadily, so it will cost the builder more to build units next year than it cost him this year.

[user9430961]

Since I can’t thank you all individually, I want to take this opportunity to thank Everyone who took the time to read my question and offer answers, feedback, and suggestions. For sure, I greatly appreciate all of the help and advice . . . especially from those of you that provided such detailed feedback and comments.

Upon reading all that was shared, I would like to add a few more details.

The housing market here in Los Angeles is really rough. There are more buyers than sellers. My partner and I have been house hunting diligently for almost 12 full months, until we found a house in that housing development almost 3 weeks ago. Before finding a house in this new housing development, it seems that every house we found that we mutually liked, there were always many offers on the house or the seller did not wait long before accepting an offer and ultimately selling the house in just a few days of putting the house on the market. So after trying to be patient and waiting almost a year with nothing to show for all of our hard work of house hunting (while the prices houses and interest rates keep going up), we needed to do something different to get a house. Thus why buying one of these brand new homes is attractive to us now, even though it means having to wait until Spring of 2014 to get a house, while knowing that this new house will cost more (next year) and we know the interest rates will probably be higher than they are today. We like the fact that these homes are sold in phases on a first come first serve basis (as long as your finances are in place by the time each phase goes on sale). To get on this development’s Priority List, you have to be pre-approved with the development’s approved lender, then you can have a priority on a house plan and a house location. Then once the new phase opens and the houses go on sale, then the pre-approved waiting buyers are suppose to be contacted by the developer's sales staff in the order of who got on the priority list first, second, third, etc. etc. etc.. Yet with buying in this new housing development, we do not have to worry about people coming along putting offers on these homes . . . because if we have to keep dealing with that, we would probably almost never had found and got a house we want here in Los Angeles. I’m not sure what the market is like here for homes that are major fixer-uppers (i.e. do those homes have lot of offers on them or not), however since we started house hunting last year, we were only interested in houses (mainly costing between 300K and 500K) that were medium fixer-uppers to move-in condition houses, that were located in nice and decent Los Angeles / Los Angeles area neighborhoods. Depending on the price of a house, we were open to remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms, putting in new flooring, doing some refurbishment of the front and back yards . . . yet all of the Los Angeles homes we have seen (that fit into this category) for almost the past year, only seem to stay on the market for 3 to 7 days and then they are gone! However the prices of homes here seem to be going up every day. As far as I know, there have not been any new housing developments in this neighborhood (where this new housing development is) for at least 12 or more years. Though when we first started looking for a house, we did not have a brand new house in mind. We were prepared to roll-up our sleeves to find a house that did not need a lot of work, while not minding getting dirty in order to do as much work on the house ourselves . . . however we did not know that we would have to deal with finding so many perspective houses with so many offers on them, that it was just almost impossible to put a reasonable offer on a house and have the offer accepted by the seller. Yet at this point, we are not ready to endure another year of this madness and getting absolutely no where. Yet it is GREAT to know, we don’t have to look at another house we both like and then deal with all of the multiple offers on it. However it is AWESOME to know that we will have a brand new house sometime next spring.

Thanks again for your help, feedback, and comments Everyone! It is greatly appreciated.