I can’t help it. I like real estate.
Speculating on properties is such an un-eggheady thing. So greedy capitalist with a bad comb over. But I like it. I got hooked during our year of house hunting. I still drop into open houses to snoop and regularly check realtor.com for home prices in town. Steve thinks I’m insane. Why would I spend a beautiful Sunday awkwardly lying to home owners that I plan to buy their home?
I like to think that all of home improvements are increasing our nest egg. When we peeled off the wallpaper in our foyer, I calculated that we earned about $10,000. Home decorating = money in the bank. Wahoo!
Also I’m itchy to invest in a rental property. Do I have the money to start investing in rental properties? Not. But I still like the idea. Driving my kid to his summer school this summer, I scoped out several properties with potential.
Last week, I was quite pleased that Kip in the comment section directed me to Zillow. Today’s Times had a bunch of new sites designed to fuel my Trump fantasies, including Cyberhomes and Eppraisals. (more links in the article.)
Apt. 11d 
Whoa, Laura! Would any of these prospective rentals cash flow? Also, may I direct you to thehousingbubbleblog.com? There’s a lot of tinfoilhattery in the comments there, but it’s a virtual cold shower for anyone suffering from the house-buying urge.
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Also, I don’t think Donald Trump (or the condos bearing his name) are doing so great right now.
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I drove past a house that we looked at when we were starting to house-hunt. I loved the potential but it was a mess inside, and the asking price was insane given the number of things that needed to be done to the house. I’m not talking fussy aesthetic questions–there was mold in the basement, some of the drywall had big punctures and holes in it, the light fixtures were hanging loose in parts, the entire electrical system of the house was about sixty years old, etcetera.
So I went past and whomever the people were who bought it clearly did a fantastic top-to-bottom rehab of it. I came *this close* to stopping and asking them how much it cost them to do that and how much they paid for the house in the first place. I really wanted to know. I like the house we ended up with, but it’s had a lot of small problems that the previous owner concealed from us and there are also some bigger changes I want to make to it–I kind of wanted to know whether I’d missed out on a better opportunity.
That way lies madness though.
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I go to open houses all the time. It’s fun, and I keep myself up to speed on the market in my area. No need to feel awkward about it, lots of people do it and the agents don’t mind. They know that the more people are interested and thinking and talking about real estate, the better it is for business. Have fun!
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It’s terribly hard to guess how long a real estate downturn will last, but it does seem to me that a great deal of the recent upward trajectory has been based in the expectation that others will pay more in future, not in people thinking that they actually need to CONSUME five bathrooms worth of toilets and the aura of granite in their kitchens.
‘I may be a fool to pay this price, but there’ll be a greater fool than me after me’
The supply of greater fools is run out. So I’m with Amy P. – this is not the time to buy real estate in the idea that you can make money on it, this is the time to buy something you want to live in and can afford.
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I love open houses; I go to them for the same reason that I enjoy “shelter” magazines. I like houses, and enjoy looking at how they’re put together. I do tend to go to opens for new construction houses/expensive houses, though. So, I don’t feel like I’m spying on the owners.
I do wish that information about renovation/redecoration costs was more publicly available. I just have no idea how much it costs to do different things (like the deck with curtain doors that’s going up across the street).
Zillow is fabulous, isn’t it (provides just that kind of public information on house prices)? Scary, too, because it means that anyone who knows your address can easily (and ease is the key, since the records have always been public) find out how much you paid.
It’s totally egg-headed to enjoy real estate. Zillow, in fact, is the product of an egghead who was trying to buy a house and decided he needed to do his own analysis to estimate the value of the house.
bj
bj
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With regard to houses and construction, one of the best reads out there is
dreamhome.blogs.nytimes.com. It’s supposed to be the online journal of a soon to be empty nesting Northern couple that is building a house on a barrier island in Florida. The blog itself is OK, but the informed commenters (who mostly hate the couple’s gargantuan project) are what really makes it worthwhile. There must be something like that for NJ, somewhere.
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Salon took this on last week. They said it was a bad idea.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/07/27/realestate_rookie/index.html?source=rss
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Amy: thanks for the link to the nyt article — I had been reading that blog, and then forgot about it a couple of months ago. It is a cool site. For example, it’s cool to know that the house they’re building is going to cost 700K.
Here’s another interesting one:
http://livemodern.com/Members/amcelroy/blog
It’s a blog of building a “glidehouse”, a modern modular house design on Vashon island near Seattle.
bj
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I’m glad you like the NYT Dream Home blog, too, bj! The comments detailing the perils of hurricanes, termites, insurance, etc. have been a real eye-opener to me. The funny thing about the blog is that the bloggers pay almost no attention to their commenters, who are showering tens of thousands of dollars of hard-earned advice on them. They own two other houses up north, too, which I find mind-boggling. To my mind, that couple is exhibit one for the enormous disconnect between the NYT’s theoretically liberal political leanings and its plutocratic lifestyle reporting. Well, when the revolution comes…
And I say this as a practically lifelong evil conservative.
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The Glidehouse does sound interesting. I also like Susanka’s Not-So-Big books, Dwell magazine (where the Glidehouse would be perfectly at home), and Cottage Living magazine. If we settle permanently in Texas, I’ve thought seriously of building a house, but it would require a lot of research and thought.
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I’m interested in this stuff too. We were landlords once (because we had to relocate for a job on short notice). We made a little money on it (not a lot), but it was stressful. I was relieved when we sold, and only had one house to worry about. So I might not make a very good real estate mogul.
The flipping shows on tv are fun to watch. A lot of them turn out very badly. Still, you always think you could do better and make superior choices…
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I have sort of a different take on all the flipping shows. In Chicago, flipping practices have been pretty damaging to the culture of the neighborhoods. Because let’s face it, when you’re buying a house as an investment or just to flip it, you don’t care about the neighbors (unless they’re criminals), you’re not committed long-term to where you live. You don’t do block groups, you don’t lobby for the nearby park, you don’t attend CAPS meetings.
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Speaking of flippers, I had my eye on a beautiful house priced at around 350K in a historic neighborhood in central Texas. Months later, I discovered the same house online, now priced 100K higher. Adding injury to insult, it had been flippered up, with the interior now almost completely redone in cream and various shades of beige, indistinguishable from new homes out in the cheaper suburbs. Why, why, why?
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I think the appeal for me is that’s how we’ve made some money in the past 20 years. Not intending to, of course, but each time we sold our house or apt, we made money. As a teacher, I’m not going to make much more than my salary any other way.
We did keep our house when we moved to the States from Israel. Perhaps we’ve been lucky but the renters have been good and the house is almost finally ours which means there might be income someday.
I still look at real estate info all the time and expect that we’ll go for something that seems to be priced low but has great potential, esp in terms of location. Not a bigger house though — that doesn’t appeal to me at all.
Another consideration lately is that when we start filling out FAFSAs for our kids (soon!), I understand that having a large mortgage might be better than having money in the bank.
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I’m sorry that I was too busy to moderate comments better. I’ll have to do another real estate post later in the month.
I do think it is interesting how differently our generation thinks about homes and real estate than our parents did. The oldies bought their homes not as an investment, but as a place to live and die in. They expected to pay off their mortgages and that was that. Now, we have no hope of every paying off our mortgage. We think of our home as an investment that we’ll eventually sell and make a tidy profit.
Don’t you think that flipping is good for a neighborhood? If you improve the home’s value, you aren’t going to sell it drug dealers.
I actually really hope that the market totally drops out in the real estate market. That way more normal people can afford to get homes around here. And then I can afford to scoop up my sweet deals. Buy low. Sell high.
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Speaking of “sweet deals,” are you familiar with the sad case of Casey Serin?
http://iamfacingforeclosure.com/history.html
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