House: 8 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, with 4300 square feet of space on 3 levels (ground floor, upstairs, and a finished basement). It was originally built in 1951, but it's had a ton of renovation and expansion work completed. The place looks immaculate inside (at least to my untrained eye). It could honestly house 20 people without feeling cramped.
House Location: Good, but not great. Easy commuting distance to work for both of us. A little higher crime, and the school district's not great (3/10 on Zillow), but we're familiar with the area now and comfortable with it. Maybe 2 miles from a mini downtown with a bunch of great bars / restaurants, live music, etc. It's on a small lot, but everything in this area is similarly small, so that's not a deal breaker. We currently live a few blocks away from that same mini downtown in a 1 bedroom apartment (built in the early 1960s with 750 square feet).
House Price: Asking $750K. Originally asked for $800K back in February, but they've been lowering it ever since. Zestimate suggests $730K is reasonable, so could probably go lower on price. Neighboring houses are mostly in the $500-600K range, so this is pricey for the neighborhood, but it's also in much better condition than everything else there (not to mention, double to triple the size of everything else there). Virtually everything in the neighborhood was built in the early 1950s. Small mostly-original houses go for $500K with 1000-1500 square feet of space. Maybe 5-10% of the houses have major renovations or have been torn down and rebuilt selling for $700K+. If this were blocks from the mini downtown, it'd sell for $2M+ easily, but I think location is driving the price down significantly.
Us: Just my wife and I (and a cat). No kids now. We might have kids in the future, but no chance of having 7+ kids needed to fill up the house. We're both in our early 30s working professional jobs in the area. Combined income is a little over $200K/year, though not a lot of job security for me (my wife has a lot more stability). Financial condition is pretty solid. We've been living below our means for years now, so we've got a lot saved up for a down payment (could do up to $300K if we had to, but we'd probably opt for a 20% down payment regardless of house price). Assuming we both stay employed, mortgage costs are reasonable.
Only Reason Why We're Considering It At All: Everything in the area is pricey. We're also considering a $450K condo (around 1100 square feet) and a $650K townhouse (around 2000 square feet). My thought process: if we have to spend $650K for a modest-sized townhouse, another $100K on top of that is only a 15% increase in cost, but it more than doubles the size of the house and gets us a much nicer place overall. It just seems like the better value. Essentially, the condo is the small bag of popcorn at the movie theater, the townhouse is the medium bag of popcorn, and the huge 8 bedroom house is the jumbo bucket of popcorn covered in butter and cheese for only a dollar more. Admittedly, we only need a small bag of popcorn for our current situation, and maybe a medium bag if we have a few kids down the line. Still though, would it ever make sense to buy the jumbo bucket even if we don't need it?
Overall Thoughts: I feel like an idiot for even considering this place at all, but I can't get it out of my head after touring it in an open house over the weekend. My wife loves the place too. Are we absolutely crazy here? Tell us why we're about to make the dumbest move of our lives.
Submitted April 24, 2017 at 11:59AM by new_account_5009 http://ift.tt/2oE9lxQ
