House Hunting : It Begins...

Well today we officially started our house hunting. We saw three houses with our Realtor Mary.

The first one was in Glendale, though the neighborhood was quiet, the area was a bit "lived" in and the house needed quite a bit of work, which would have been fine if the neighborhood was a bit nicer.

House number two was in Burbank and the neighborhood was much better, we actually really liked the place. The outside of the house needed a little work but the houses on both sides were so nice and you could tell their owners really took care of it. Well we went inside and I couldn't believe it. The layout was nice.. but you walk into the kitchen and there was so much water damage that the hardwood floor was bulking and breaking.. Mary warned me not to fall through the floor. We continued to walk through the house and though the set up was nice and the rooms were big there were holes in the ceiling, walls and floors. It was banked owned and they were asking $390,000 for it.. $390 for this place.. it was a total tear down and rebuild.

House number three was in Valley Glen/North Hollywood. This was our first house with actual
people living in it. It's very strange walking around a persons house while they are watching you. The house was nice on the outside and looked great on the inside. The neighborhood was okay to good but the only issue with this house it was a short sale. A short sale is a very complicated process where the bank has to agree upon the offer and price of the house. It can take months and the price can vary from what the realtor started it at... since this house was already at our maximum amount we decided to not even try.

So we didn't find our dream house, but we learned alot about what we want and what we absolutely don't want. I was a little discouraged as the market may be a bit soft now and a buyers market and we are willing to spend $400,000 but it's still not enough to get a decent house in a decent area.

After we did the three houses with Mary we decided to expand our number of cities that we were going to look in. We expanded our listing to include Van Nuys as there are some nice areas in Van Nuys.. we found about eight homes and printed out directions to each one and headed back out to look at the outside and neighborhood of these houses, if we found one that we liked we would let our Realtor know and she could schedule a viewing of the inside. So we drove around for about two hours and viewed many houses... one surprise was an area of Van Nuys called Lake Balboa. Many of the streets were tree lined and in really nice shape. There were a few houses in this area and it seemed the price was more in our range. So we sent three of these listings to our Realtor and hopefully will be able to take a look at the inside of this place next week.

All in all it was a very eye opening experience. Buying a house is suppose to be a fun and rewarding experience but so far it's frustrating, stressful and exhausting... and this is only the beginning. But in the end Harry and I will own our very own house.. and that is exciting.