I think, in the end, your family has to be happy in the house once the doors close between your and the outside world, so the house comes first, with location a close second.

I've spent all of my adult life in suburbia, where there wasn't a lot of difference between the new-ish houses and I had to drive a car to get anywhere. I was happy in all those places. All of those houses had fairly big yards, which give the advantage of personal greenspace, room for a dog, outdoor entertaining, maybe a pool, and space to garden, and I've enjoyed taking advantage of all that. The down side is that the more personal greenspace people have, the farther away everything is. You need a car more. You know your neighbors less.

I've also lived my entire life in college towns--seven of them, five if you don't count the outliers like Camden where the entire economy doesn't revolve around the university or college. You're weighing what I see as the biggest pro/con balance of a college town: Living close to the institution is expensive and the houses are older, with the hassles and expense that comes with age. But boy are they usually cute! And the neighborhoods in those older neighborhoods are full of people who have similar educations and experiences to yours, so they tend to be friendlier and more diverse. (I'm generalizing here, but it's what I've observed.) I was always a little jealous of my friends in Gainesville who were a bit older and thus bought into those bike-to-work neighborhoods when they were more affordable. Only you and your pocketbook can decide how that cost/benefit balance works out for you.

Oddly, Quirt and I are retiring to place that's very like those older, near-the-university neighborhoods, only without the university, and we're making the same tradeoffs. The house is older and needs some work, the yard is small for our rambunctious dog, but the neighbors are incredibly friendly and interesting.

I think we're going to be really happy there, but our fingers are crossed that we made the right cost-benefit decision.

I think in a market like this, it is worth expanding your search area so you get the maximum amount of listings presented to you. When we were looking for this house, we had about 14 school districts and we looked in all of them - our search radius was probably 60 miles wide. We looked at over 60 houses. We were originally only looking for older houses (pre 1940s) and then finally decided to expand to newer houses because we hadn't had any luck. The house we ended up buying was built in 1998 but built to look like a 1700s farmhouse, so it turned out to be the best of both worlds.

That said, don't assume that a newer house will not need work. This house turned out to be the biggest money pit we ever could have imagined due to the improperly installed stucco. (DO NOT BUY A STUCCO HOUSE! DO NOT BUY A STUCCO HOUSE! LET ME REPEAT DO NOT BUY A STUCCO HOUSE! Meaning newish - stucco over wood framing circa 1990s or later. Old stucco over masonry is fine. And be careful with stick-on stone and brick masonry-type veneers - they can have the same problems!) Now that it's all fixed, it's fine, but it was a financially devastating experience and we're probably still overall under water on this house despite the massive growth in real estate prices since 2002.

Anyway, back to your question. I would expand your search area and consider all listings that come up. No one says you have to buy the listings you see in the less desirable areas, but at least you'll get a chance to consider them. You'll know pretty quickly (even from a quick drive by) whether the location is acceptable to you or not.

And also do not be afraid of an older house that needs work -- one thing I learned through my time as a homeowner (first in a 200 year old former grist mill with a creek in the basement and finally in this house with its rotting walls and bad stucco) is that anything in or on a house can be fixed. (For example: older house with single pane windows? Get storm windows like people did for hundreds of years before the invention of double panes!)

Bad neighbors, a busy loud street, an airport nearby -- that's the stuff that CAN'T be fixed (but can be learned-to-live-with if you love the house enough.) And once you've looked at enough houses, you'll know right away whether the house is for you or not. For me, it is really important to love the space that surrounds me every day so that was the most important thing to me. (And 20+ years and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, I can say that I still do love everything about my house so at least I have that LOL.)

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Originally posted by Mary Anna:
I think, in the end, your family has to be happy in the house once the doors close between your and the outside world, so the house comes first, with location a close second.

I've spent all of my adult life in suburbia, where there wasn't a lot of difference between the new-ish houses and I had to drive a car to get anywhere. I was happy in all those places. All of those houses had fairly big yards, which give the advantage of personal greenspace, room for a dog, outdoor entertaining, maybe a pool, and space to garden, and I've enjoyed taking advantage of all that. The down side is that the more personal greenspace people have, the farther away everything is. You need a car more. You know your neighbors less.

I've also lived my entire life in college towns--seven of them, five if you don't count the outliers like Camden where the entire economy doesn't revolve around the university or college. You're weighing what I see as the biggest pro/con balance of a college town: Living close to the institution is expensive and the houses are older, with the hassles and expense that comes with age. But boy are they usually cute! And the neighborhoods in those older neighborhoods are full of people who have similar educations and experiences to yours, so they tend to be friendlier and more diverse. (I'm generalizing here, but it's what I've observed.) I was always a little jealous of my friends in Gainesville who were a bit older and thus bought into those bike-to-work neighborhoods when they were more affordable. Only you and your pocketbook can decide how that cost/benefit balance works out for you.

Oddly, Quirt and I are retiring to place that's very like those older, near-the-university neighborhoods, only without the university, and we're making the same tradeoffs. The house is older and needs some work, the yard is small for our rambunctious dog, but the neighbors are incredibly friendly and interesting.

I think we're going to be really happy there, but our fingers are crossed that we made the right cost-benefit decision.

this is a very interesting take. i've been house hunting off and on in a college town for the past few years and i like how you have laid out the trade offs, which are very true! and i hadn't quite thought about it in such a concise way.

On this most recent trip the houses in the best neighborhoods were older with lots of charm, but in our price range they are tiny and have minuscule back yards--but these are now a multi-million dollar neighborhoods, which wasn't true just two years ago. So there's also getting over the breathtaking acceleration in prices, which show no sign of abating.

two years ago we could have bought a very nice house that meets all our needs in the same neighborhoods, but we were looking at farms then, further out. now we've decided we only want to buy one more house, and it needs to be in town, and the cool neighbors are super important to me. walkability is important. but now the houses that went for 600k or 650k are --seriously--1.2 million.

this is why i keep bringing up the idea to SK of holding your nose and making the plunge. as my agent has said to me many times, "don't worry, you can always back out." for me, this is critical, because it is rare for me to just "know" I want a house, and I have made many mistakes i regret now because i hesitated.

water under the bridge. but prices tend to only go up, houses tend to appreciate faster than budgets, and maybe you just get into a "good enough" house now, build equity in the same market you are buying in (very important), and bide your time for the perfect place. or, like me, you end up falling in love with your ugly duckling.

my own failings in this regard are perfectionism, and a tendency to see negatives before i see positives. don't be like me!

I do agree with MA that you have to be comfortable inside the house. A bad layout is a regret forever.

Lisa and pique's stories really resonate with me...the structural problems that Lisa talked about, and pique's shift in requirements relating to location and function...

The wtgs were first time home buyers in 1980. We spent months looking at houses, never being able to find quite what we were looking for. I think we focused on the negatives and didn't give enough weight to what was right about a house. Poor realtor, he was a friend of Mr wtg's family and I think he was ready to scream by the time we found this house.

We left the showing for our current home and were discouraged, but that evening we had an epiphany. We realized that despite needing a lot of work, it ticked off all the boxes and was a home that could work for us. We thought it would be our starter home and we could move to something larger later.

Home inspections weren't a thing back then. A week after we bought it we discovered it needed a new roof and a few years after that we had to have the foundation shored up. We survived all that and are still happily living here 43+ years later.

As for changing requirements...If I were buying now, it's not the house I choose to live in as we age. I wish it were a ranch and not a two-story, and I would prefer a more open floor plan. We've made it work for us over the years, I think we can continue to do so as we age. We can put in a lift if the stairs become an issue. We can put a washer and dryer on the second floor. What I won't do is change the floor plan or remodel the kitchen or baths again. They're solid, and styles be damned.

I love our town and the services it provides. After several decades of problem neighbors, we now have the best folks ever living around us.

I'm happy we landed here.

These comments are all super helpful, thank you everyone!

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it is worth expanding your search area so you get the maximum amount of listings presented to you.

We do get listings from a fairly wide area, and we've been going to open houses and asking for showings even in areas we think are a little farther out than we want to be....

I think it's more that I need to think about whether to reassess what I think of as the area where we want to live. And that's hard to figure out...

When we returned from an overseas work assignment in Australia with three children and a fourth on the way, we wanted a house and property big enough to accommodate them, room for some gardening, a good school district, a not-too-impossible commute to my job in downtown Pittsburgh, and a price we could afford.

We ruled out some areas and looked at a dozen houses with three different real estate agents that covered other areas because we were in a hurry to buy. I was staying with my brother-in-law and his wife so I could go to work and my wife and children alternated weeks with her parents and my parents until we found a house to buy, closed on it, and moved in. One agent understood and respected our desires and ended up with two houses that were our finalists. We chose the one we still live in. By coincidence, some friends of ours bought the other one although we didn't know it at the time,

However, the point of this story is that things change and the ideal house and location may not always stay the same either. My initial commute to work involved about a ten-minute drive to a park-and-ride lot and about a half hour on a bus each morning and evening. About ten years later, I was laid off from my job. The subsequent jobs I found were about the same commuting time, but had no direct bus service so I had to drive to work for the rest of my career. I didn't like that so well.

Also, the township and in particular the area near us was quite rural when we moved here. We're the last house on a dead-end road and have another house next to us and one across the road, while there are farm fields on the other two sides. That hasn't changed, but only a little further away farm fields, woods, and a 1300-acre fruit orchard have been displaced by housing developments and a 27-hole golf course. The population of the township has more than tripled and our rural area is now solidly suburban with all the traffic that generates. My wife often says, "There aren't going to be any trees left in Pine Township" when we see yet another development commencing.

So, if you can, try to imagine what the future may bring and factor that into your house hunt.

Big Al

Big Al, thanks for sharing that!

quote:

try to imagine what the future may bring and factor that into your house hunt.

This is great advice!

I sort of assume that a house in an established neighborhood, with houses all around it, will likely not change dramatically (unlike a house with empty land around it), but you never know.

I'm grateful to our agent for being very conscientious, and telling us about big roads nearby or that a nearby road is slated for expansion etc. for example.

So here’s a question about sloping floors…

Are there sloping floors that are not a concern? If we’re looking at a 20 y/o house, or a 30-40 y/o, are there times when we see sloping floor and think it’s not a problem? How much house settling is normal and how much is a concern?

In the house we owned, built in 1960, there were a few pieces of furniture we added a shim to but for the most part it wasn’t an issue and the house felt very solid. All the contractors and people who visited or worked on the house while we owned it always said it had great bones, and we certainly felt that way.

But in the house we’re renting, and in a few of the houses we’ve visited and ruled out here, the unevenness of the floors seems off the charts and more of a concern. In our rental, both Mr. SK and I had to get carpet tiles to put under our office chairs because the rooms all slope down towards the center of the house and when we sit at our desks (which are against the wall) we are pulled away, towards the center of the room. This house does not feel solid at all.

But is that my imagination or a real concern? And does it differ somewhat depending on the age of the house? And the foundation? For example, our rental is on a crawl space and was built in 1994. We haven’t visited any houses that are on slabs yet.

Anyway, the tl;dr question is, how to evaluate sloping floors to figure out what’s a concern and what isn’t?

I think you’re going to want to leave that evaluation to a pro. There are a ton of reasons for sloping floors, some easy to spot and some not. Some are cheap to fix and others aren’t.

I’d suggest making an offer subject to professional inspection and your acceptance of conditions causing floor sloping.

quote:

I’d suggest making an offer subject to professional inspection and your acceptance of conditions causing floor sloping.

Thanks Steve. We will be doing an inspection regardless, but I guess I didn't realize we could stipulate not just the inspection, but something specific like that.

As it happens, my agent contacted us this morning about "gappy garage" house. The sellers agent contacted my agent and suggested that the buyers may not work out and encouraged us to make a back up offer.

Gappy garage house doesn't have sloping floors, just that weird garage thing. And a 22 year old roof.

It's also right in my top choice area for neighborhoods and has the best floor plan of any of the houses we've seen so far....

quote:

The sellers agent contacted my agent and suggested that the buyers may not work out and encouraged us to make a back up offer.

I don't know what to think about this, btw... Maybe us making an offer just pushes the other buyer to get their act together, and our "offer" only benefits the seller...

or, maybe the other buyer doesn't have their act together, and our offer gets us this house.

I have no idea.

If you really like the house you have nothing to lose by submitting a backup offer. If you don’t do that you’ll likely lose it.

Subjust to professional inspection of the garage floor and your acceptance of its condition, of course.

And a time limit.

quote:

If you really like the house you have nothing to lose by submitting a backup offer.

This is the part that's not clear to me.... I just got off the phone with my agent again.

So we make an offer, they accept, we do an inspection, it flags some big ticket problem. My understanding is, we can't pull out at that point, we have to make a response. Say the response is "repair X and give price reduction for Y." Then the seller can do "all of it, some of it, or none of it." I think we can pull out if they say "some/none."

Right?

Anyway, my agent reached out to the seller's agent again and let them know we're still interested, and we have an appointment to go see it again first thing tomorrow morning. (Tuesdays are our worst days for house hunting bc I have to be on campus all day and Mr. SK works until almost 8pm, so we can't go see it today)

But you're right, I think we need to make a back up and then see what happens.... But we want to go stomping around the house, backyard, garage again first.

Pictures?

quote:

Right?

If the contract is written that way, yes.