Buying a House In Todays Market, a tale from the trenches

The wife and I have been TRYING to buy a house for the past six months and are sadly still renting. Not because we haven’t found something but mostly because trying to buy a house right now is the biggest crock of crap you are every going to try and wade through.

All I can say is the banks do not disserve your pity, in fact the banks alone are most likely the cause of all the foreclosures. Sure they say they don’t want your house and on paper it would be better for them to work with you to keep you in your house but the reality is, the banks are forcing the foreclosures plain and simple due to their negligence.

The real estate market right now is a buyers market if you’ve got hip waders on. The problem is most of the houses on the market today are not for sale by owner which is the start of the problems. Most of the sales are short sales or foreclosures, what’s the difference you might ask? A short sale is pre-foreclosure where the owners have told the bank they can’t pay and want to sell but the house isn’t worth what they owe, so will the bank take less. The bank will agree and the house is listed and sold for less than what is owed and foreclosure proceedings are evaded. The problem is, the banks take so incredibly long to respond that potential buyers find other properties or just loose interest and the banks are left with no choice but to foreclose with valid offers in front of them.

We wanted to offer on this one house three months ago but the agent told us they had an offer already for more than we wanted to pay but that the bank hadn’t responded back in weeks. The buyer was considering pulling their offer so we thought we may put an offer in but with the bank being negligent in responding we figured it wasn’t worth our effort.

Another house we responded to, we were warned up front about shenanigans going on with the bank. This property was a short sale and they had an offer and the buyers had started their inspections. However a new buyer had put an offer in for more money so the bank took their offer instead, apparently this is legal in short sales? The problem was this new buyer then couldn’t secure financing so the deal fell through. You have to ask yourself, hasn’t greed taught these banks anything? No it hasn’t, they just make the same stupid mistakes over and over again and want you to help bail them out of their stupid decisions. If you make a stupid financial decision does anyone bail you out? No of course not! Anyway back to this house, by the time we were in the picture the agent told us that the bank could take weeks to months to respond which wasn’t acceptable to us.

We found another house and made an offer on it, coincidentally it is a house right next door to the first one I talked about. Again it’s a short sale so we put an offer in. After a week the agent told us that because the house hadn’t had any offers, there was no bank associate to manage the sale of the property and evaluate the offers. So we had to wait. It’s now been three weeks and the bank STILL does not have anyone assigned to manage the sale of the property and now there’s also a competing offer in on the house. So it will be no surprise to me that this house goes off the market for foreclosure proceedings even though there is at least one offer at asking price on the house, the bank just refuses to respond.

The most recent house we offered on will take me a bit away from the bank issue of buying a house  to the realtor story. Every one of these houses , the selling agents have been the rudest S.O.B’s we have ever had to deal with! Why is it when you walk into Walmart to buy a soda you get service with a smile but you want to pay half a million dollars for a house you’re treated like they’re doing you a favor if they even pick up the phone to talk to you. It’s absolutely ridiculous, here I’ll show you were you can stick my 500k ! Anyway this latest house we offered on about 60k over asking price because we really wanted it and they picked someone else. The realtor is refusing to allow anyone to tour the property for some reason but we drove there and walked around and peeked in the windows anyway. So we didn’t get this house but it’s gone back on the market, either the previous buyers couldn’t get financing or they found something wrong with it. So we put in an offer again but it’s the same rude arrogant selling agent unfortunately and they have a few offers ‘significantly’ above asking so I don’t imagine we’ll get it this time either. Since the banks decisions are based strictly on the dollar amount and apparently not the fact that we’d be paying 100k cash down payment and have a letter with our offer saying we’re good for the money already. Nope, if we offered 400k on the house and someone offers 405k, the bank will go with the guy who offered 405k no doubt and then we’ll see this house back on the market again in another 6 weeks because the 405k offer people couldn’t get financing.

Anyway the summary of this article is, don’t feel sorry for the banks. The banks got themselves into this problem and the banks are doing nothing to get themselves out of this problem aside from whining to congress to have them via you and your tax dollars bail them out.