Hellobee Boards

Yes, I am! We want to build our next home, although we are also open to buying a home to upgrade, or to buying a real fixer-upper and gutting it completely or knocking it down and building new; so we’re open to a lot. Our only real requirement is we want to be in a specific neighborhood. Our realtor is decent, but everyone around here has a small town mentality about home buying – I said to him, I see the following addresses in our neighborhood have double lots. Call them and see if they want to subdivide and sell a lot. This house is about to fall down – call them and see if they will sell. Offer than $XX, give them 24 hours to respond, and let us know what they say. His response is always “Is that place for sale?” Um, no, but if you offer them a stack of cash maybe it will be! None of the realtors we’ve worked with have any sort of ambition for thinking outside the box. They all look at us like we have 10 heads when we suggest they call people and ask if they are interested in selling their home. It’s frustrating.

We have the house plans, the $$, the home builder and all the subcontractors all lined up. Literally all we need is the land, and we’ve been looking for almost a year now with no luck. Wah.

*Then* we did find one place we loved; put an offer in on it that was $10k OVER the asking price and we still lost! :o!

YES! The day we found our house was the morning I told DH that if we didn't find anything, we're going to stop the hunt for a while! (4 months, 100+houses, 4 or 5 lost deals, etc.)

Hang in there!!

Yes, it totally happened to us! I hit a rut when new listings weren't coming onto the market and I had totally exhausted myself searching everything that was available. It seemed like we were never going to get anything we liked for our budget. Then I decided to change my search parameters a little and raise my upper limit by $50k and see if I could bring a seller down to our price. That opened us up to just enough new options that I found the *perfect* house! It had been priced wrong, IMO - the agent should have listed it at $x99k but went over in case the seller wanted to drop the price. And in the end he did come down to our price so we got a much better house than if we hadn't expanded our search.

@yoursilverlining: That's ridiculous that none of them get why you want to ask if anyone wants to sell. My friend really wanted to buy in a desirable development so her agent sent heartfelt letters to every owner, and one of them responded saying she was about to list her unit but would give them an opportunity to make an offer first. I hope you get your land or home, and soon!

It took us 4 months, 50+ houses, 2 failed offers to finally get our place. Hang in there, somehting will come up!

@autumnlove: We're in a similar situation. We've been looking for over a year now and keep getting out-bid by contractors offering cash. We have a 35% down payment and are offering WAY over asking and are still being out-bid by hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's super frustrating to put everything together on a house listed for $795, offer $900 and see it sold for $1.1. If I wanted to buy a house for $1.1 that's what I'd look for.
Good luck on your search. I hope you find (and win) the perfect home soon.