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To me patience is very important in buying a home. I really don’t want to live in my #6 choice 30 years from now and think of what might have been if I held out a few more months.
I have some friends like this. They are waiting for the perfect home. They have been waiting for five years now. It works for them, but not for me.
I know city-data isn't really the place for this, but there is a well-known problem called the Secretary Problem that is particularly to buying in a hot market. The problem goes like this:
Quote:
The basic form of the problem is the following: imagine an administrator who wants to hire the best secretary out of {\displaystyle n}n rankable applicants for a position. The applicants are interviewed one by one in random order. A decision about each particular applicant is to be made immediately after the interview. Once rejected, an applicant cannot be recalled. During the interview, the administrator gains information sufficient to rank the applicant among all applicants interviewed so far, but is unaware of the quality of yet unseen applicants. The question is about the optimal strategy (stopping rule) to maximize the probability of selecting the best applicant. If the decision can be deferred to the end, this can be solved by the simple maximum selection algorithm of tracking the running maximum (and who achieved it), and selecting the overall maximum at the end. The difficulty is that the decision must be made immediately.
This problem is stated in such a way that you can actually solve it.
Quote:
The optimal stopping rule prescribes always rejecting the first n/e applicants that are interviewed and then stopping at the first applicant who is better than every applicant interviewed so far (or continuing to the last applicant if this never occurs)
I think that you will always do better seeing as many homes as possible, even if it's just to quickly discard most of them. Narrowing yourself to a town before seeing a single property makes no absolutely no sense to me unless there are more properties available than you could possibly see. That hasn't been my experience.
I don't disagree with any of the methods described here but ultimately (as most here know) you need to be ready to move on your decision immediately. This has been even more important in recent months as I discovered buying/selling during the height of the panic. I had 3 towns on my top list and 2 on my backup for a sfh purchase. I ended up buying a condo in a town completely out of left field, so it really depends on your mentality/needs.
As to the potential decline in values I would hesitate to even make a guess. Nothing makes sense right now, but if you need somewhere to live you need somewhere to live.
There's an old phase: you need a boat to be in the race.
Its very true because of the indisputable law of inflation. Its better to have a house than no house if home ownership is your ultimate goal. The home will keep pace with inflation while your salary increases over time. Unless you buy in a rust belt, it will help you stay in the race
I have some friends like this. They are waiting for the perfect home. They have been waiting for five years now. It works for them, but not for me.
I know city-data isn't really the place for this, but there is a well-known problem called the Secretary Problem that is particularly to buying in a hot market. The problem goes like this:
This problem is stated in such a way that you can actually solve it.
I think that you will always do better seeing as many homes as possible, even if it's just to quickly discard most of them. Narrowing yourself to a town before seeing a single property makes no absolutely no sense to me unless there are more properties available than you could possibly see. That hasn't been my experience.
Very cool stuff. For me I think being particular really helps. Like right now I’ve narrowed things down to West Roxbury and Waltham. I’ve lived most of my life in this general area so I have a good idea of what to expect from each town in the area I’d want to live in. There are better houses outside of this area, absolutely. But the drawbacks of living in such an area would cause me too much difficulty for one reason or another that they can easily be ruled out. For example commuting time or crime or bad personal experiences. Really any number of things. West Roxbury and Waltham don’t even border each other so then you can find reasons why you would eliminate places within the area you otherwise enjoy, in my case places like Newton or Brookline (in my case eliminating both because of $$$).
There's an old phase: you need a boat to be in the race.
Its very true because of the indisputable law of inflation. Its better to have a house than no house if home ownership is your ultimate goal. The home will keep pace with inflation while your salary increases over time. Unless you buy in a rust belt, it will help you stay in the race
There is something to say for this line of thinking. If I could do it all over again I probably would have saved more right out of college and bought something early. Rent really is just throwing money away.
But this has less obvious drawbacks to. Some of it depends on personality even. Like you could go in and say buy a place in Lowell just so you have something meanwhile having the intent to buy in Somerville...eventually. But then you can become complacent. Or maybe it has nothing to do with personality and you’re getting close to having enough for that Somerville home and find that your Lowell house is a lemon and impossible to sell without taking a huge loss. Or your Lowell home is great, but the Lowell market tanks shortly after you buy it anyway.
There are just so many moving parts to buying a house.
We moved last October, and I'm sure glad to have that one behind us. We sold the old house and closed March, 2020.
Let me just say that dealing with real estate agents is very frustrating. I'll tell my wife to tell the agent who will tell the other agent who will tell the seller my question or message. In the translations comes different answers, as me the buyer and the seller get about 180 degrees off what my question/message was about.
And then you have everyone with their hand in your pocketbook at closing.
I'm just thankful that homes in The South are larger and cheaper than in the Northeast. And it's not quite as dog eat dog as the market in many large cities. But unfortunately places like Boston is a place where a really good realtor could be a great asset. Here? Not so important.
I have some friends like this. They are waiting for the perfect home. They have been waiting for five years now. It works for them, but not for me.
I know city-data isn't really the place for this, but there is a well-known problem called the Secretary Problem that is particularly to buying in a hot market. The problem goes like this:
This problem is stated in such a way that you can actually solve it.
I think that you will always do better seeing as many homes as possible, even if it's just to quickly discard most of them. Narrowing yourself to a town before seeing a single property makes no absolutely no sense to me unless there are more properties available than you could possibly see. That hasn't been my experience.
Thank you!!! This is a great piece of thinking! In hindsight there were a few good ones we saw back in February that would have worked out pretty well. We just picked on a handful of reasons to dismiss those and tried to convince ourselves that we will find a better one, especially with the spring market. If similar ones came by now, we would jump. But the very few options is just frustrating!!
Keep in mind that you are not making a lifetime decision. Rarely will the first house you buy be your last. On average, people in the US stay in a house for 7 years. My wife and I were in our first house for 3.5 years, second house for 7 years and current house for 15 years.
bugelrex is spot on with his assessment. In this market, you are much better off buying any house (within reason, of course) than not buying a house, or continuing to wait to buy a house.
Having agreed with that view, however, I will still stand by my conviction that comparing houses in disparate towns is foolish. Andover and Westford are probably considered the "best" of the communities mentioned and may have similar demographics but they are separated by 18 miles of highway. Unless you work in Lowell, I don't see how someone would have both those towns on their short list.
As for the towns in the middle, you have Chelmsford, Tewksbury and Billerica, but why not Wilmington? I generally think Wilmington is undervalued based on its location. If you're going to consider North Andover then why not North Reading or Middleton? See, it becomes a slippery slope very quickly. Better to focus on the 1 or 2 towns you like the most and be prepared to act quickly.
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