DDD, it's so crazy....

[buddy]

My dad and step mom are selling their house. It's a little ranch with a half story conversion. So two bedrooms up, they added a master bath with a double tub but it's out of date decor wise....
They remodeled the kitchen and opened a bedroom wall so there is an open concept plan, but small...a nice room was added on the deck so that's called a family room, also off the kitchen and the basement is finished, but again...small. It has a good bath and sauna. So, three bedroom, three full bath small ish nice house...cute yard huge new garage. It's near the airport but in St Paul. blocks from a beautiful path on the river. It sounds much smaller than the house you got for your son.....
It was listed for $313,000!

That's crazy!

They are buying a retirement townhome, one level..... My step mom just retired last month and dad is 73 so the money will go to that. I'm glad they could wait till things started getting better for Sellers. Of course, she worked in Wells Fargo mortgage company, lol.

 

[DDD]

Yes, Buddy, it sure as heck differs upon location and market. I am genuinely thankful that we found a "nice" house in a "nice" golf community for fifty grand. I watch the ?? HGTV channel?? is that Home Gardens? I don't know. BUT I watch as I'm trying to go to sleep and I see these mega young couples buying $300,000 grand homes and I'm thinking "What to heck?"

I first thought that it was because I am a senior citizen. After watching more often, however, I think it is down right scarey..LOL. Yeah, I know this isn't the 60's or the 70's BUT truthfully although I wish your folks well, I honestly fear that the "have nots" will not be able to dream of being "haves". I share your rather shocked observations. Hugs DDD

 

[buddy]

My house was bigger, but a first tier suburb and it sold for about 170000.....that was right before the market crashed. A year before that houses in my area sold for about 270 grand. We had just remodeled so i was lucky to pay off my loan and have enough to pay my car and move.

I watch those shows too. Sine areas with 3000 square feet homes under 200000, and tiny old homes in other areas for nearly a million. Hard to understand.

 

[JKF]

Omg here in north NJ $300,000 gets you a tiny little fixer upper. We lucked out when we bought our house bc we knew the couple who was selling it. We got an outdated tiny two bedroom 850 sq ft Cape Cod for a "steal" at $265,000. That was 7 yrs ago. We've since gutted the entire house and added a huge addition - upstairs and down. It's 3 times the size it was and was recently appraised at $450,000. It's a nice house but honestly that's a ridiculous price for what we have. You could buy a mini mansion for that price anywhere else!!

 

[tiredmommy]

We never had the real estate bust that so many other areas have had, but we never had the bubble either. I was very happy that we were able to sell our tiny 3BR ranch in a good neighborhood for $39k more than when we bought it 14 years ago. We're fortunate that the market turned up last year so we could get a decent price.

 

[bby31288]

JKF you are right NJ prices are nuts!! 380,000 gets you 3 bdrm 2 bath! Rent is even worse!

 

[InsaneCdn]

You could buy a mini mansion for that price anywhere else!!

Ummm... not here! You can buy a pretty nice house, in a pretty nice neighborhood, in a decent-sized city, for that kind of money, but it sure wouldn't even come close to a "mini mansion".

 

[JKF]

True IC - I probably shouldn't say "anywhere else" and maybe "mini mansion" is a little extreme but in a lot of areas $450,000 could get us a house twice the size of ours. Plus property. We have a pretty small backyard.

So looking forward to when we can sell this place and use the money to buy a place with lots of land down south! 10 more years of this torture and we're outta here! lol

 

[busywend]

Here prices differ by town. My house in the upscale (richer) neighborhood wouldgo for $250k easy.....in the town I am in, $145k. Big difference. And it is 2300sq ft! But, we pay large property taxes here in NY. Taxes per month are about $420. So, makes how much house you can buy that much less per month.

 

[JKF]

We pay HUGE property taxes here too! Over $9000 per year! It's nuts! Definitely looking forward to settling down elsewhere someday!

 

[AnnieO]

Our house was a "steal" for $139K, in 2005. Officially we have 1492 SF - livably we have 2900, because a finished walk-out basement doesn't count. We have a 1.75-car garage upstairs (we can get 2 in but no one can open doors), and a 6-foot-ceiling 1-car garage downstairs (don't ask, I don't know, I just enjoy it). The old 1-car garage upstairs is half our pantry (inside) and half mud room/storage (outside). 3 bedrooms (2 nice-sized) and a full bath upstairs, living room, dining room, galley kitchen, downstairs is a master suite with a sitting room (currently my craft room AND Meggie's nursery) and full bath, another bedroom which we use as a computer room, laundry... And we also have a nice deck in back and a porch in front. Not to mention a huge back yard and a decent front yard.

The house across the street makes ours look small as it is a 2-story and has a pool. However it was only appraised at $178K! (The appraiser probably came through in late November after Christmas threw up on their front lawn.) Regardless, either home would be well over $250K, just in a different part of town. My parents' house was $203K in 1987 and is a bit smaller than ours, though it is a ranch and has no basement or second story.

I really think it depends on where you are...

 

[SuZir]

I have always thought properties in US and Canada are ridiculously expensive like your rents are and like the houses in those real estate programs they for some obscure reason show in our tv are. But seems to be much more varying than that.

For an interest I made a search in site that lists about any property or flat for sale in this country (notice the r) and came up with three (3) houses, that are in liveable condition (as in are not sold for total reno/for the land), have plumbing and cost 50 000 dollars or less. One had one room and a kitchen, two had two rooms and kitchen. All build over 60 years ago and look like it. All in back woods. Flat you may be able to get with that (usually studio or one bedroom and kitchenette) in smaller cities. We live in ridiculously expensive area because we are both rural and near major city and that is something many want. Even very common, twenty, thirty year old, three bedrooms, 1200 sq feet homes with small yard are over 500 000 dollars.

Then again, renting seems to be much cheaper here. For example difficult child pays around 500 dollars a month for one bedroom, living room, kitchenette and sauna flat with about 600 sq feet. It is a good deal, but market price wouldn't be more than 150 or 200 dollars more. It's half a mile away the main street of that smaller city (less than 100 000 people.) Similar flat here in the big city would still be less than 1000 dollars a month in middle class neighbourhood close to down town.

 

[InsaneCdn]

Your prices aren't that far from ours, SuZir... the house you describe would be priced about right for semi-rural here (i.e. "within range" of the city), but not for real close to the city. Rent, on the other hand... you can hardly get an all-in-one-room basement place for under $800/mth, if you want a half-decent neighborhood. (wrong side of the tracks is less because nobody wants to live there)

 

[everywoman]

I live in a Coastal town, about 10 minutes from the nearest beach and 5 minutes from the nearest river. I bought my home on a short sale for $95,000 during the worst of the housing debacle---in August of 2011. It recently appraised for $200,000 but I could never get that out of it here. I live in a nice neighborhood of median priced to higher priced homes. The home is 1700 SF with 2 bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths. I have a two car garage attached and and 20 X 30 shed on the property---and about 1 acre of land. Last year my insurance went up to $819 a year! I feel very, very blessed.

 

[Marcie Mac]

In Ca you couldn't buy a shed for 50,000 LOL When I bought my house in 85, it was 110,000 and 50 miles away from where I worked, but it was the only place I could afford - living close to work wasn't an option and I didn't want to raise the kids in the city. At the highest point of the real estate market, I could have sold it for about 700,000 but the problem was where would I move to. Plus Ca taxes are more or less frozen when you buy a house - its only when you buy another house, you pay the going rate on the taxes on what you pay for it. Right now my taxes are 2% of what I paid for the house originally. Houses in the neighborhood don't even last a month before they are sold and prices start at 550,000 + Other than dealing with earthquakes, I like living in Ca but could never afford to move to a decent neighborhood elsewhere.

Marcie

 

[DDD]

The $50,000 house has annual insurance premiums of about $100 a month. For some strange reason the second house we made an offer on which was a bit bigger in the same community had a $2600 a year premium. I don't get it as they are in the same golf community and maybe twenty blocks away from each other. on the other hand, we are in Hurricane areas and the premiums really vary. Our home has approximately the same premium as easy child/difficult child's and it is evaluated at around twice the price. Weird. by the way,...we could not sell our house for that value. It's "upside down". DDD

PS: Guess I should add that we "refinanced" a couple of years after the brain surgery. In retrospect LOL I guess we should have been evaluated for brain issues ourselves!

 

[nerfherder]

We got our 3 acres - 2.7 acre water rights, paved road, "recently renovated" (hah) doublewide-ish mobile home (still got some jacks under the house here and there, and some mystery wires, and rotting insulation where they remuddled the bathrooms) for 165k. Out here in the Great Basin, the big question isn't "how many bathrooms" or "how recent are the kitchen appliances" or "what color is the house painted" but...

..."Do you have water rights?" That applies to irrigation, and even though the water table's quite high (formerly a huge lake, now basin/range with small lakes and creeks with a couple of wetland/reservoirs, and 3000 to 8000 year old petroglyphs where the lake edge used to be about five miles from our house, agriculturally alkaline high desert) we need the irrigation to grow just about anything. Biggest market crop here is alfalfa.

I have a wonderful horror story (and TRUE!) from when we lived in Davis, CA. I was walking to the elementary school to pick Kiddo up, and I noticed a house in renovation. The owner who was doing some of the work stopped to chat, and when I asked the price (idly wondering what prices were) he said "650,000." I answered, "Sorry, we just don't get enough income to afford that. It is a gorgeous house though."

So he explained it was easy, and anyone who could swing it could get a loan, get family to co-sign, fudge numbers here and there, get a loan that was interest-only the first five years... he went on for quite a while about how to jimmy a loan out of the banks, and I was actually shocked at all the ways he was describing. It was STUPID. I mean, why go to those lengths to put yourself in that kind of debt? I politely declined, explaining my ethical standards applied to not buying something we couldn't afford even if the bank thought we could.

This was 2007.

I went home after work, thought about all he said, discussed it with the Blacksmith who knew of such things (his dad was into reno/flipping properties back before everyone and their brothers were doing it). Then I thought about the stock market crash of 1929, and one of the robber barons who sold everything weeks before the crash, because he realized his shoe-shine boy was trying to give him stock advice, and if everyone's buying into a market like that, the bubble's going to pop Real Soon. Well, here was Random Stranger on the street giving me property investment advice, and I started thinking "Well, if everyone's doing it, something's going to pop."

And I was very, very happy we sold our house in 2005, and were renting.

So from that day on I started watching the business news and Dow Jones prices on news.google.com/business, and was actually on my morning break at work, on the breakroom computer, when the markets started to nosedive. I was also taking bets (harmless, no money involved) every Friday morning about how many banks were going to be shut down that day.

It was crazy, like watching a slow motion train wreck.