Housing Softening: MPLS Leads the Way in Price Cuts.

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Originally Posted by MN-Born-n-Raised

Here is some of your advice from last year.
Do you remember this advice from 2010??? As we learned, you would have bought it for $169K and it would have been worth $109K!!

The problem with your advice is you make blanket statements and they don't apply to all areas of the metro or country. The couple mentioned in the article I posted, could have waited longer to invest in rental properties, but they also would have lost cash flow every month. Personally I wish I would not have purchased a house and had to sell 3 years later, but my move was work related and I had to deal with the circumstances. Luckily I was able to turn a modest profit and again it was mainly because of my choice to buy in the right area, for the right price, and put in the right amount of work for the right cost. I am not going to sit here and tell people that what I did was easy, because my house took longer than expected to sell and I put in alot of my own labor for the amount of money I got out of the property.

For my new situation I decided to purchase a duplex and I am living in one side and renting out the other. I couldn't pass up the opportunity because the price was so low that the rental income is paying my mortgage, insurance, and taxes. This is also another area of the market that you have avoided discussing, what do you think about multi-family units? I don't disagree with everything you say, the main issue I have is that you make such definitive statements that are not always true.

[MN-Born-n-Raised]

Originally Posted by track2514

The problem with your advice is you make blanket statements and they don't apply to all areas of the metro or country. ....

Go back and read my posts. I used words like "aggregate", talked about trends, discussed different demands at different price points etc. I said IF you have the opportunity to wait and buy a home to live in, push it out for a few months at a time to see how it looks. That's because the housing trends were pointing towards further depreciation. You said I was giving bad advice. History proved I was right and you were wrong. If you like, I can pull more of your quotes. Putting it bluntly, you know very little about real estate. For that matter, anyone who thinks that home interest deductions (for their personal use) is a good thing knows very little about money unless we are talking about 3.5% rates. But your quotes were in the 5.5% era.

As a whole, the metro housing dropped by about 10% from June of 2010 till now. What that means is a lot of peoples values dropped in the metro area. We can look for exceptions and discuss ROI (which is how I made my decision to buy in AZ). That wasn't what we were talking about on the 20 pages of this thread.

Because you cannot admit that you were wrong, you are quoting some multi dwelling cnbc fluff piece. That's not going to help the guy who cannot refinance his $500K Eden Prairie home. Nice try.

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"But your quotes were in the 5.5% era."

Wrong because my quotes were around the time I bought a house and my interest rate was 4.75%

[MN-Born-n-Raised]

Originally Posted by track2514

Wrong because my quotes were around the time I bought a house and my interest rate was 4.75%

I bet it wasn't 4.75%. You paid closing costs so your truth and lending statement showed a higher rate. If you only took out a loan for a short duration (your words not mine) then the actual rate is much much higher. In other words, you lost a lot to borrow money. Most people forget about those costs when they sell and calculate their profits.

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Nope I added all the costs associated with buying and selling into the equation, because I would only be hurting myself if I left those out. I made a profit because I purchased low, renovated, enjoyed a tax deduction for a while and then sold at a higher price. I would have lost money if I purchased higher or contracted out much of the work I did to the house. The labor costs for even easy cosmetic changes can add up very quickly. For instance, I painted the exterior of my entire house (stucco), which is a job that many would contract out for a pretty high price. It cost me a total of about $800 for all of the paint and supplies and the labor of course was all me. This is one of the other hidden problems with the current real estate market, very few people are like me and would paint their house. If I would have paid a painting crew $6000-$8000 to paint my house that is wasted money that I would need to get back at closing. It always amazes me when people say I "renovated" my whole house and I "lost" money selling it. It should read more like "I paid someone to renovate my house and because of the added labor costs I lost money selling it."