House hunting is such an emotional venture, it’s very easy to forget your criteria. Like us, we know that we’re not cut out to own a “fixer upper” or even be in the market for a home with significant cosmetic needs. We’ve been there, we’ve done that  - and honestly, we’re not very good at it.

So when we were looking at a duplex built in the late 1800’s the other day in a fabulous neighborhood, I left with the impression that it was “old and cold.” One can tell that someone has been working hard on the property, but still - the woodwork has a 100 years worth of paint on it. Literally, the millwork is nearly rounded out from all the paint build-up. I hate refinishing woodwork and feel like life is too short to immerse myself in chemicals and scrape my life away.

My spouse was far more tempted than I am and was even willing to overlook the fact that it has no garage. A garage is high on my list -it doesn’t even have to be attached - but it does need to exist.

Then he voiced the temptation to spend way more than we should to get exactly what we want. And that’s not a good idea either. I know that one day, we’ll find a property that we’ll be willing to compromise one or tow of the things on our list for, but it is indeed good to have  that list handy -literally written down - when you’re out hunting.

It may just help you stay honest to yourself.

The Landlord from Will Ferrell

Being a landlord is hard work. You need to know what’s what with tenant law, how to write a good contract and have a PhD in Interpersonal Communications. I’m revisiting this topic because now we’re looking a duplex. I know, we’re the Sibel of home shoppers. We had a duplex for a number of years in NorthEast Minneapolis and we’re just lucky to have really mellow tenants living upstairs from us.

But luck is not a great business strategy because after all, having rentals - be it one or fifty - is a buisness.

Tom, my agent here at Webdigs, turned me to a course that he took and loved. It’s through Kaplan Professional Schools and can be taken online. The promises to walk you through  screening potential tenants to handling evictions. In short, it provides the right information for you to stay above the legal waterline and be profitable.

And if you haven’t watched the Landlord on Funnyordie.com, it’s worth streaming.

We keep going round and round on this house search business. Not even two weeks ago, I pulled the plug and thought it was best to wait to buy. Sell our house and go shopping with cash, even if we lose out on the tax break and the great interest rate. Honestly, I’ve felt like a dog chasing my tail - and that’s never pretty.

But the other night, Jason saddles up to me with the lap top. There’s an MLS listing on it and I immediatly bristle. “Come on, just look at it,” he says with the smoothness of a coke dealer. I do - and of course, there’s a lot to like. I and get the rush all over again. It has a loft with a high-ceiled livingroom making it a pool of light. I’m just a sucker for light.

Buying a house is a balance of trade-offs. (Well, actually all of life is a balance of trade-offs but as this is a real estate blog, I’ll try to limit it to just that.) Twice now, we’ve found adorable homes with some huge pluses. Mostly being in our price range with an open-floor plan, storage and a garage. Where we live there are nearly no garages with properties so to be looking at a house with a 2-car attached PLUS a bonus 2-car in the back for storage is like porn. (Jason says that when it’s a one-car detached it’s only soft core.)

But they’ve all had location issues - not bad ones, not “I don’t want to walk the streets at night issues,” but issues none the less. Too far from town or neighbors with the 40 year-old RV parked in the front yard sort of issues.

And am lucky to have Tom, my Webdigs Realtor, helping me remember to keep my eye on the prize. Do I want to rush into a house in an adrenalin pumped love affair (Yes! Yes! I swoon) …OR do I want to buy a home with long term value in downturn economies like the people in Edina who actually saw growth in 2008. (Oh Yeah, you’re right, Tom.)

A couple weeks ago, I shared with the blogsophere that we bid on a house. (Then my computer took a turn for the worse.) Anyway it’s a house we looked at before and liked, but not loved. We bid exactly the amount we could afford. Not a penny more — and… someone else was looking at the house and put in a higher offer before us.

How do I feel about that? Pretty good actually. I’m happy for the owner to sell the house for closer to his price. And maybe the things that irked us about the house do not bother the new owners in the least.

And how cool is it that we were OUTBID on a house in this market? To me, it means that things are getting better. That has been the word in a broader sense, too. According to the realtor.org website February housing sales INCREASED.

The press release states: “Existing-home sales – including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops – rose 5.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate¹ of 4.72 million units in February from a pace of 4.49 million units in January…”

I’m sure the good deals in mortgages has a lot to do with it. I heard a report yesterday that some lenders were giving rates in the 4% range. Wow.

So our patient hunt continues…

Alright…months back we offered on a house (we’ll call it house number 1) that we like, but don’t love. What we love is the neighborhood. The homeowner countered back…and sadly, finances being what they are - we walked. Politely walked.

Since that time we’ve flirted with a lot of other houses. One (house number 2) we could easily afford and liked the open layout, urban feel and view — but at the end of the day, we didn’t love the neighborhood. 

Then we had a tyrst with a builder/friend who hoped he could get us a place at one price point, but when it was set and done, the house (number 3) was going to be a lot more money. We could almost get there, in fact, a bank was eager to lend that amount and more…but, in that scenario there would be absolutely no margin of error.

When my husband and I had our own business and clients would be late paying us, we’d talk about “the elephant on our chests.” The stress was unreal. With this sweet little new house, it would have been like rolling ourselves in peanuts and wondering why there was a herd of pachyderms in the yard. There would be no one to blame but ourselves. We’re still a little bit in mourning on that one. (The builder had drawn up these sweet plans though called …wait for it…’the Lucy-J’…sigh.)

So now we’re back to House number 1 — it needs a roof, it has a slightly awkward layout, has no washer/dryer or dishwasher -and there were, shall we’ll say, some poor cosmetic choices made.  But we’re making an offer of not one penny more than we can truly, honestly afford - and we’ll just see what happens. It will be a business decision and we won’t take umbrage if the seller tells us no.

Then again we’re a non-contingent offer with a quick close option. We’ve got some things working for us, too.

Tom, our Webdigs Realtor, is making it happen right now. That he’s an enthusiastic partner in  all this and that helps immensely. Typically business transactions make me nauseous.

And I’m just trusting him and that things just work out they way they’re supposed to.

More later…

Location is the first rule in house hunting, even when the home itself is a sweetheart.

The one weekend we don’t have our kids, my husband decides to drag us aboard the house hunting roller coaster again. We liked the house we saw, we really did. Had a great view, updated kitchen and a ferocious efficiency of space. It had that “Not so Big House” thang going on, using long site lines to great a sense of volume. And did I mention it had a killer lake view?

It wasn’t in a horrible neighborhood, but it wasn’t a great one either. Here’s a few things we did to help us make this big decision.

1. Used the free Crime Mapping Site: We entered the address and looked at the number and types of crimes in the area.

2.  Walked the neighborhood at night just to see how it made me feel. Would I want to walk a smallish dog here? Did it have sidewalks - and did neighbors take the trouble to shovel them?

3. Used a blog network: I’ve mentioned before that when you’re thinking of moving into an area try to find an area blog where people chat it up. I’ve been posting on a local blog for a while and felt comfortable sending a message to a fellow poster asking for the skinny. Turns out she had lived one block away from where we were looking and chose to move when she had children.

4. Drive the neighborhood in the morning to see how many kids are making their way to school.

When we did all this, it was clear this wasn’t going to a place that held its value like Edina has during the recession.  And since location is the name of the Real Estate game, this truly wasn’t the house for us.

But it’s still an exciting time for looking and we’re still scouring the ads and bending our agent, Tom’s, ear. We just have to be patient.

Alright, I looked at a house yesterday that had only been on the market for a week.

The MLS listing only shows exterior shots…and the open house had 17 people at it.

A friend who had a house on the market for several months accepted an offer yesterday.

This seems incredible. There’s a change in the air - people are out snoofling homes and finding 5% or better loans available.

The whole thing feels really hopeful.

Are you hopeful?

I joined a gym partially so my pants might continue to fit and partially to make some much needed endorphins during tough real estate and job times. Especially after reading Tom’s recent post claiming that low mortgages may have already bottomed out.

Here’s what happened last week:

I was retrieving my pants from the locker at the gym - and before I realized that I had foolishly stuffed my cell phone and some change in my pockets, they were all over the floor. I was bemoaning my broken cell, when a large naked woman came up to retrieve the change. At first I thought she was assisting me, but then she just walked away with my quarters. I said, “Um, I believe those came out of my pockets.”
She replied, backside to me, “No, it’s mine.” Of course, if she could have read my thought cloud it would have said something like, “Well, if this change didn’t fall out of my pocket, WHERE pray tell do you THINK it fell from? And if I pull your arm will MORE fall out?”
She walked back to her place where she proceeded to aggressively apply lotion to her rear - in my general direction and way too close to my bubble.  It seemed like a real conversation-ender.
Honestly it was surreal. I mean, one can hardly look at an entirely naked person, much less be confrontational. Maybe she needed the money, I don’t know. I decided that the 75-cents or so was worth the story as it was.

I didn’t want to have to add some pitiful ending like “and then the naked woman beat me down.”

So after asking around, two kind friends stepped forward to give me their old cell phones. (It’s always great to say something like, “Did you hear that I broke my cell phone? It involves nudity and theft.” Everyone makes time for a story like that.) The phone that liked my SIM card the best didn’t have a cord, so my husband went around to local hotels and dug through their lost and found bins. He got the perfect match so I’m all set up at no cost. I was pretty proud of the ingenuity there.

I’m not sure if there is a moral to this story, but it was too good not to tell.

(Thanks to Julee who came up with some of the funny things to add to my thought bubble cloud other than just WTF?)

Okay, we all know that it’s a buyer’s market out there. But does that mean you should give an insultingly low offer while demanding a load of concessions? Broderick Perkins, a consumer journalist, cautions against being this new breed of Landshark.

He wrote, “Even in a buyers’ market, that will only alienate the seller, especially those less motivated with top-value homes. The seller will simply look elsewhere for a more reasonable buyer.”

This got me thinking that there should be some sort of golden rule of buying and selling homes. Sure, sellers get they’re not going to get top dollar for a home now, but there is no need to completely hose someone either.  When we were looking recently and decided to not take the counter offer, the Realtor came back to us asking us to think of some alternatives such as rent-to-buy and other purchasing vehicles.

When we did the math, we realized that the only offer we could in good faith make was so low that it would be a waste of their time, probably tick them off and potentially damage the business relationship should we be able to make a bid in the near future.(Hope hope hope.)

We didn’t want to be remembered as those jackasses who tried to steal their house.

Am I saying you shouldn’t embrace a good bargain? Absolutely Not! Go out there and shop the deals, but just remember that there are real people at the other end of that offer - delievered by a real person - your Webdigs Realtor.

Dog art by the talented and lovely Ms. Lisa Pahl. She’s right here in the Twin Cities and can be contacted at lisapahl@mac.com.

It’s been a hellva week here at the rental Rectory.

Our dog of 10 years chewed through 3 waterlines flooding the house and knocking out the furnace — in a house we rent month to month. Belle and I got caught in a blizzard on the way home from Minneapolis and had to stay in a roadside motel eating the contents of my emergency road kit - dill pickle chips and chocolate. Then we had a kid’s birthday party, acquired a hamster and found out the dog has dementia and was a “risk” both to property and children.

And when you’re a tenant you have to think differently. This isn’t my house, I’m borrowing it for money, and have an obligation to return it in good condition.

So I had to go put him down yesterday. It was pretty awful.  He couldn’t be left alone so he had to come with me on a bunch of errands ending with the BIG errand at the vet. It was terrible getting back into the car each time and having him so happy to see me. All I could think was “Dead Dog Riding.”

This has clarified a few things for me:

1. I talked aloud to that dog A LOT. He heard the first draft of everything and was very supportive and…

2. I want to buy a home. Furthermore I may be willing to take more risks than I thought to make it happen. Once you’re king of your castle, it’s hard to live in serfdom again.

And there really couldn’t be a better time for interest rates at a historic low and lots of great homes out there for the bidding.