Home At Last

I woke up the other day to the sight of two bunny rabbits playing on my front porch. And despite all the sleepless nights, panic attacks and tequila leading up to that moment, it was one of the happiest of my life. Because it’s my front porch.

I think about this when I relive the last several months, and can easily say, with no doubt at all, that it was all worth it. But though I was reasonably mentally prepared – or so I thought – with the notion that it would take some work to buy my first home, I was still completely bowled over by the sheer ferocity and intense inscrutability that is the modern-day short sale-filled housing market.

So while I do not want to discourage you from attempting to buy a home, I do want to prepare you. Forewarned is forearmed, right? Before catapulting ahead at full force, determined to be living in your new, perfect, picket fenced home in three months, splash some water on your face, take a deep breath and get real. Because while a cursory scroll through any real estate search bank may reveal quite a number of seemingly well-priced “deals,” there’s more to the short sale picture that will soon be revealed to a prospective buyer.

Here are some bits of wisdom I gathered the hard way, during my six-month roller coaster ride through the Orange County real estate market.

In the name of all that is holy, do not buy a short sale. I read up on short sales early on in my research, and the first challenge was simply deciphering its meaning. I’m not sure when the breakthrough came, but when it did, I realized whoever came up with that name either had a sick sense of humor or no concept of the English language. Because while, yes, a short sale is an agreement between a homeowner and his bank to sell a property at a loss (short of what’s due the bank), the process itself is far from short, and can take a month – if you’re lucky – just for a prospective buyer submitting an offer to get a response from the bank. My research, real estate agent and gut all strongly advised against attempting to buy a short sale because of its time-consuming nature and overall risk – short sales can fall apart at any time for any of a number of foreseeable and unforeseeable reasons ranging the gamut of possibilities, not least of which is foreclosure. So what did I buy? Before you judge me, it wasn’t a rebellious spirit or masochistic tendencies on my part that compelled me to embark on a short sale transaction. It was the fact that there wasn’t much choice. The market can change overnight, and by the time you read this, the story could be twisted in an entirely new direction, but when I was involved in the largest part of my search, between January and mid-May, I was confronted with Web page after Web page of listings for short sales, the occasional foreclosure and virtually no standard sales (the way my parents and their parents purchased homes, buying from the homeowner rather than the homeowner’s bank) in my price range.
 
Be prepared to be completely unprepared. Like any good journalist, as soon as I learn about something new, I research. I’ve also been euphemistically referred to as “thorough” on more than one occasion. Needless to say, I did my homework throughout the process and asked a lot of questions, and yet, I never ceased to be surprised or caught off guard by something that came bolting out of the sky and tumbling down to smack me on the head. Because the market is in a state of perpetual change, with new regulations coming into play as a backlash to the initial collapse, it’s a brave new world dealing with new rules and procedures that did not exist five years ago or even five months ago. I suggest you do everything you can to prepare yourself – especially if you are dealing with short sales – but know that in this market, something can and probably will come out of nowhere and ruin your day, week or month.

Be involved and proactive, even annoyingly so. You can’t afford to be a passive buyer. I’m not sure what it was like in the market’s glory days, but what I do know is the only way I seem to get people to understand how the market has changed is when I inform them I submitted over 30 offers and viewed close to 100 properties over five and a half months. My mom says that over her years of buying homes, she has typically found a home she loved in a matter of a handful of viewings and a couple of months. These days, you have to be on your game from start to finish: whether it’s when you’re searching for properties or when you are in escrow. When you’re first searching for homes, get on realty search engines and stay on top of them daily. Get out to look at properties as much as possible and make offers. When it comes to foreclosures and standard sales, you’ll want to move quickly, because everyone wants those. Consult your agent and do your research when making offers. The amount you offer depends on the type of sale and the specific property; there are no hard and fast rules. When your offer is finally accepted and the process moves forward, don’t sit back and wait for everyone to tell you what to do next. You have to anticipate issues whenever you can and be hypervigilant.

Embrace the virtue of patience – within reason. It’s a little easier to practice patience early on in the process when leases aren’t ending and movers aren’t scheduled. But it can still get pretty wearing as weeks roll on and you don’t know where you’ll be a couple of months down the line, or even a couple of days, as was the case with me. There’s nothing quite as frustrating for me as having to sit and wait for some unknown someone somewhere deciding my fate, and not being able to do anything other than that. So I waited… and when it got to be past the point of ridiculous, I wrote letters. I’m not sure if that helped, but it sure made me feel better. Watching dramatic HBO programming also seemed to help.

My goal is not for you to run screaming to the warm safety of your apartment at the prospect of buying your first home. It is simply to leave you with a dose of reality. Are there bargains to be made in the housing market? Yes. Will they come easily? No. After you buy your home, will you break into a cold sweat every time you think back on the process, bunny rabbits or not? Most definitely. When you walk into your new home with your brand new puppy, is that the most awesome feeling ever? Absolutely.