JanT
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- Jun 7, 2005
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When we sold our house in Texas last year we rented an apartment - initially for 3 months so we could wrap up a few things and also to see how Covid shook out. Our plan after that was to do a fair amount of traveling if Covid was under control. Well, we all know how that's worked out. So, we extended our apartment lease for 6 months thinking that would give us some time to do some travel planning and to continue to see how Covid was going. Then in February our apartment was flooded during the big storm there when an upstairs apartment's pipe broke. We headed to a hotel for awhile and decided with interest rates so low (and Covid still playing havoc with travel, maybe we should go ahead and buy another house....somewhere. Because they didn't have another apartment for us they let us out of our lease and we headed out to see what we could find.
We checked out Florida and Arizona and quickly scratched them off the list for various reasons. We headed to Henderson, NV (suburb of Vegas) and have looked and looked and looked - until I am ready to SCREAM! It is crazy out here and builders/developers are playing all kinds of games - only releasing two or three lots at a time, allowing people to bid lot premiums up, outrageous lot premiums period (think $30K - $160K for pretty much standard lots). Housing prices are escalating like crazy (new and resale homes) and they're trying to get $600K for a house that in normal times would be priced around $450K. Calls to sales agents don't even get returned because they are so busy with sales they don't care if they lose one. The one area we are really interested in is not releasing any more lots until mid-May and I can only imagine what prices will be like then. On top of that the sales woman was so snotty and snooty it pissed us off.
So....we're heading to Arizona for 7 weeks where we'll be staying at Sheraton Desert Oasis on Getaway weeks I scored when they were on sale. After that, we'll have to decide what we're doing. But right now, we've put the brakes on buying a new house period. We're thinking we're going to probably just get another apartment in Texas, go through our storage units again deciding on what we can get rid of, and just ride this crazy housing market out. It's going to settle out at some point and we'll be ready then. But, hopefully by then we'll be able to travel internationally which is what we wanted to do anyway.
Bottom line is things are just too crazy right now and we're not going to invest in a house that in a year will appraise for less than what we paid for it (most likely).
We checked out Florida and Arizona and quickly scratched them off the list for various reasons. We headed to Henderson, NV (suburb of Vegas) and have looked and looked and looked - until I am ready to SCREAM! It is crazy out here and builders/developers are playing all kinds of games - only releasing two or three lots at a time, allowing people to bid lot premiums up, outrageous lot premiums period (think $30K - $160K for pretty much standard lots). Housing prices are escalating like crazy (new and resale homes) and they're trying to get $600K for a house that in normal times would be priced around $450K. Calls to sales agents don't even get returned because they are so busy with sales they don't care if they lose one. The one area we are really interested in is not releasing any more lots until mid-May and I can only imagine what prices will be like then. On top of that the sales woman was so snotty and snooty it pissed us off.
So....we're heading to Arizona for 7 weeks where we'll be staying at Sheraton Desert Oasis on Getaway weeks I scored when they were on sale. After that, we'll have to decide what we're doing. But right now, we've put the brakes on buying a new house period. We're thinking we're going to probably just get another apartment in Texas, go through our storage units again deciding on what we can get rid of, and just ride this crazy housing market out. It's going to settle out at some point and we'll be ready then. But, hopefully by then we'll be able to travel internationally which is what we wanted to do anyway.
Bottom line is things are just too crazy right now and we're not going to invest in a house that in a year will appraise for less than what we paid for it (most likely).