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What convinced me to move into my current home is that with small young children we needed a house close to a school and luckily the house we moved to was on the same street.
Neighborhood. 12 homes, cul-de-sac, lots of kids. It's what we wanted for our kids to grow up with. The house was meh - large, but needed a lot of updates. We've spent the last 5 years getting there and are still happy with our choice.
We were downsizing for the 3rd time. Location, size (1500sq ft, patio home), cost, new construction, dead end neighborhood, an HOA to control others, an HOA that does all outside maintenance, an HOA with no amenities, size of HOA, public streets, public sewage/water, etc.
tldr: It was a crazy bargain and I knew it would appreciate by a LOT (it did).
We toured the house when it first came on the market, and it was 200K above our price range.
Two sales fell through, and the seller was in distress and needed to get rid of it. The price dropped near our range. Then the government shut-down happened and that kicked out some of the competition.
We low-balled it, tied with another offer, got an inside scoop from our realtor, and edged out the other offer.
Truth be told, I don't like the house. The design is stupid. The layout sucks. It was listed as "needing work" which we never did. The previous owner did a bunch of dumb ****, because he thought he was a handyman, which I am forever finding and fixing.
The location is good, but not perfect. We can walk to town, but it's a longer walk than I'd like. There's no ocean view (yet, a renovation may fix that) from inside. It is on a large lot that is hard to manage (brush clearance).
However, it is the best investment we've ever made, and it works well enough for us. The design has grown on me as I've explored ways to renovate it to get all the features I want. The original layout still sucks, but it can be modified--without too much expense--to be a really great house with the ocean view and layout I want.
As the kids get older, the big lot is going to be more of an asset instead of just a hassle. So I'm extremely happy with it, even though it's ugly, run-down, and dumb.
We started looking for a new place to live when our area started experiencing a rapid rise in pricing and population. We wanted to buy a place first before we would be competing with a lot of incoming out of state buyers that would be in our same price bracket.
The house we actually chose was priced under market value by $100k... Long story short, the owners were in bankruptcy and they didn't care what the house sold for, as they weren't going to be getting any of the proceeds anyway, it was all going to creditors.
The house showed up on the MLS on a Friday afternoon, and said there was an open house to be held on Saturday. I told my wife we needed to go look at the house NOW as it was a steal for the square footage and location. We saw it on Friday around 3-4pm, and we had an offer submitted about an hour after that. They countered, by 7pm we accepted their counter and went under contract.
The next day, we went back for the open house, it was packed. It was an amazing deal, there were 5-6 other couples there who wanted to make an offer, even above asking price... but the seller's had already accepted our offer. Couldn't believe their realtor didn't tell them to wait until after the open house, as the purchase price was near our max budget and I'm sure there were offers that were higher than ours, but like I said, the owners were in bankruptcy so they didn't care what it sold for, they wouldn't be getting the proceeds anyway, the higher the selling price, the more their creditors would be collecting.
So we bought it, and have spent the last several years updating and improving the home. While we got a great deal, the house did need quite a bit of TLC and upgrades. We're about there now after being here 5 years, only small projects here and there left to do.
What convinced us was three things:
1. The original oak woodwork (Craftsman-style)
2. Perfect size for the two of us (1,338 square feet)
3. Our budget was less than $100,000; we paid $94,000.
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