Special Ingredients: Homeward Bound 3 - Chris’s Incredible Odyssey Through Real Estate

In the last month, I’ve passed these losers by in sheer guts and determination by surviving the harsh wastelands of the American real estate market.

In a horrible twist of events that could even Lucifer himself couldn’t consciously weave together, I am now a homeowner. To say this is messed up goes beyond the meaning of the term. The only way the world will be able to experience a shift in paradigm of this magnitude again is if I have a child. That’s when you know it’s perhaps time to check out off of this rock.

The reason my homeownership is such a perversion from the norm is by examining my general outlook on life. Born an only child, my parents never impressed upon me any expectations for the future. So long as I kept my grades up and didn’t give any reason for the police to pay a visit, I was allowed to continue floating by on the stream of life. I lived each day one at a time in blissful ignorance.

Then, in 2005, at the age of twenty-three, I began to realize I would at one time have to grow up. This was a terrible revelation to say the least, but it wasn’t like I couldn’t have seen it coming. I had been dating the same girl for about four years and we were talking about marriage. My friends had all moved away from home and were on their own. I was the only one resisting at that point.

So I decided it was time to plan for the future. This was a big step for me, because I never gave the future any serious thought. I knew there was a natural sequence of events I would have to follow, but I never believed I would ever get there, like time could be stopped at a single point just because I wanted to play outside some more. From elementary to middle school to high school to college, I never thought I would take that next step, but I would always manage to trip and fall down it anyway.

The problem I had at the time was I was a student worker at Owens Community College’s audiovisual department working for practically minimum wage. I had found the job I wanted, but my lack of experience saw that two other people got it over a year before. I stuck it out for a lack of other options, earning a hundred dollars a week and going nowhere.

At this time, I decided it would be a good idea to sack my money away in a certificate of deposit at the bank, which would pay off a high interest rate and give me a couple of extra bucks. The minimum deposit on one of these was a thousand dollars, but I actually managed to save up for one. It would only take another twenty-nine of these to make a good down payment on a house, never minding paying for the other expenses that come with homeownership. I could have afforded one in about 342 years.

Yet I still considered it. I figured I could eventually afford a one hundred thousand dollar home. Don’t ask me where I came up with this figure, because you’ll never find it on any map of logic. I casually asked around what about what I could get for that, and the results weren’t pretty. At least if I wanted something where there the chance of someone dragging me through my front window and into the night was relatively low.

Fortunately, I was hired part-time in the AV department in the fall of 2005. It was about this time I started really giving real thought to my plan. I figured I could start looking for a house in 2009, having saved enough to buy something nice. I would get married and live happily ever after. The perfect plan!

I was on my way, too. I managed to put away about ten thousand a year, much to the joy of the banker, who was surprised a kid in his early twenties had figured out something people twice my age still had trouble with: savin’ iz gude. I got hired full-time in the fall of 2007, and this only increased my earnings.

The thing was, though I had a plan, I never really knew how I was going to execute it. Christy and I looked at a few houses here and there, but ultimately I just thought I would wake up someday in 2009 and decide to go buy a house. That’s not to mention I once again didn’t take the fact I was going to be buying a house seriously.

Then came the decisive disruption in the plan. My cousins decided to get the family together for Christmas just like my grandmother had before she died. So my mother and I showed up with Christy, and it was there I nudged my cousin Chuck and said “I’m going to need your services in two years.”

“You should be buying a house now.” he replied in his usual loud, knowing way, a statement I didn’t take seriously, because he always says that. Chuck is a real estate agent, if you haven’t gathered.

But he insisted, saying the market was so good that I could save more money by buying now than I could by waiting and gathering up more money. I rush of fear overtook me as I realized another excuse to stay a kid had just crumbled, and I complained to my mother that Chuck was trying to sell me a house, much in the same way I child would complain that their older brother is picking on them. But soon I shrugged and told Chuck to go ahead and find me a few houses and I would consider it.

I was not in the mood to deal with this at the time, because my beloved dog, Sandy, was dying of melanoma, and it turned out we would have to put her down three days later. Once I had mourned her loss, I decided it was time to get on with my life, and it was time.

In truth, Sandy was probably a big reason I decided to start looking. She had been with me for twelve years and was my only lasting link to my life as a teenager. With her gone, I realized there wasn't really anything left for me at my old home, and it was time to move out.

This was much to the protest of my mother, who stood as another reason I wanted to get out. She isn’t the easiest person to live with, with her insane food hoarding that causes a mound in the kitchen that’s legendary among my friends, her pigsty-mentality of organization, and her melodramatic mannerisms. There were times that the thought of her brought me into homicidal rages, giving solid evidence that a move might not only be good for my health, but the health of those around me.

In the meantime, Christy had been helpfully and religiously looking at homes online for the last few months, so we had some ideas about what was out there. I took the Big Step one day at work when I contacted an agent and asked to see a house we were interested in. I also contacted Chuck and told him to get his list together.

My lone requirements for the house were it had to be in Oregon, because I don’t want to leave, and it had a good basement, because my plan was to finish it and live down there for the rest of my life in nerdy seclusion, coming up only occasionally to go to work, for food, and for sex. Christy, being, no offense, a woman, wanted a two-story with hardwood floors and white kitchen cabinets, and probably magical unicorns parked in the garage. I eventually wilted her dreams away, because let’s face it, I was putting the down payment on the thing, and all of that stuff could be added later, with the possible exception of the unicorns. Those are hard to come by these days.

I want to emphasize the location part, because in this department, I have a severe mental disorder. Not only do I have to live Oregon, but I have to live in a certain part of Oregon, essentially a two square mile rectangle, and I’d exclude quite a few places from that. I’m very conscious of where I’m located in the city, and I didn’t want to run the risk of spending years hating where I ended up.

The first place we looked at was a two-story in a quiet neighborhood. The good points were it was well-kept, had a big backyard, was in a good location, and was in visual range of McDonald’s., Actually, that last one could be a downside, because I would be inspired to go there every time I look out the back window and would die of high cholesterol within a week of moving in. The downsides were it was smaller than you would think from looking at it, had a crappy basement that was partially finished (and this part was counted as a bedroom to boost its value), and it was overall too expensive for what it was.

The following Sunday, we decided to look at an open house, because Sunday is a holy day for realtors, and the only day they will hold an open house, and only until four, or the real estate gods will smote them. I got a hold of Chuck and he told us to check out that place and we would go see houses privately the next day.

The house we saw was a Cape Cod in a street called Sugar Pine. We had looked at it months before on my birthday when I stopped at a garage sale there and noticed the For Sale sign. I looked on with mild interest, and didn’t see much of a point in coming back, but Christy and Chuck insisted. Honestly, with all of the previous owners’ junk out of there, the place was really nice, and it had a finished basement to boot. I was getting excited.

The next day, Chuck met us at the Sugar Pine house and we looked it over again. I decided I really liked it and would probably make an offer for it. The price wasn’t bad, but the owners were not likely to budge much on it, and it had enough things that needed to be changed or fixed for me to waver a little, but I wanted the house.

Then Chuck took us to one just down the road a little to a house located on Ponderosa. To our annoyance, another realtor was showing the house at the time. I glanced in and didn’t really like what I saw. I was resolute on the Sugar Pine, so I didn’t really care if someone else got the house. We moved on to a house on a street called North Reach.

It was at this point Chuck’s professionalism started coming into question. Most houses that are being shown by realtors have little key lock boxes where the house key is stored for agents to access and get inside. Chuck couldn’t get the lock opened. After trying several times, he called in for the combination and we decided to go back to the other house in the meantime. It turns out he was using the code for the Ponderosa house, because they looked similar. And I’m trusting my one hundred and fifty thousand plus investment with this guy.

We finally got into the Ponderosa house, and it was there I slowly became impressed. The first thing I noticed was the carpet, which was a hideous sky blue and white mix with a subtle spray of brown that made the entire thing look dirty. It was the type of carpet that could only have been laid by monks who used its presence for resistance training purposes. Plus, there was a spindle missing from the stairway railing, which was sort of like a lawnmower engine backfire compared to the nuclear blast of the carpet, but it did show the place needed some work.

While I’m on a roll, the lot size left a bit to be desired. The backyard was really big for a house in this neighborhood, but the front narrowed out quite a bit. This meant the neighbors were really close, which was a slight issue with me, because no one would mistake me for a people person.

But these were my only complaint. The kitchen and dining room had been renovated and were gorgeous. There was an add-on living room in the back. The backyard was nice and big (at least I think it was. It was dark at the time, but I couldn’t see the back fence, so it must have been big). The basement was partially finished, and though it wasn’t that great, it was good enough. The upstairs featured four bedrooms and two full baths. Overall, it was a great bargain.

Chuck then dragged us back to the North Reach house, where our reaction was less than positive. The funny thing was, it was the same house we just saw and loved, built by the same contractor. However, this one reminded me the game Silent Hill, where the Ponderosa house was the normal world, and this one was the twisted nightmare version of the same place.

Everything looked like it was twice the age it actually was (this house was actually a few years newer than the other one), there were a few holes knocked into doors and grates, things were falling apart, and the basement was a complete mess. Chuck confessed this was a scheme to force me compare the two houses and see the value in the Ponderosa. And it worked, because I made an offer that night.

Yeah, I pretty much made the biggest financial decision of my life based on a twenty-minute tour, but I think you know you have something when you look at it and say “This is it.”

The offer was $15,000 below asking price, but considering the current housing market, this was a fair offer. I went back to Chuck’s office and we began to fill out the paperwork. There’s actually not too much paperwork to go through. There’s a lot to read, but Chuck was getting paid to do that, so I just initialed everywhere he pointed, thus displaying the business sense of a boo.com executive.

I’ll point out now that this property was a short sale. Most of you probably don’t know what that is, so to put it simply, it’s a lender’s bail out card against foreclosure. It’s basically a foreclosure, but with less red tape and fewer bills.

How it works is that the debtor has to default on the loan, basically saying “Well, can’t pay you back! You can have this used up house, though! We’re out of here!” In this case, the couple who owned the house divorced, and neither of them could afford the loan on their own.

At this point, their lender decided to try to avoid foreclosure and sell the house for less than they paid for it. This bill was around $200,000 I’ve heard, so if the lender accepted our offer, they would be taking more than a $50,000 (minus what the couple already put in) hit to the shorts. The lender takes all of the money from the sales and uses it to pay off their costs, likely losing a bit of money. Makes you want to jump right into the exciting world of money lending! To think it could have been WORSE if they foreclosed!

The ironic thing about the short sale is there’s nothing short about it. The offer goes from the potential buyer’s real estate agent (if they have one) to the agent representing the lender, and the offer then has to be taken to the not-really-home owners. If they approve, the offer goes from the agent to the lender, who ultimately decides to accept or decline. The entire thing then has to be shoved all the way down the assembly line back to the potential buyer. Overall, this process takes anywhere from two weeks to more than a month. I’d hate to think of how many people would starve to death in their cars were waiting at the drive-thru if fast food shared this ironic moniker.

As the stressful days turned to agonizing weeks, we finally received on answer: there was another offer. Because this process takes so long, there’s a huge window of time for another interested party to come and foil your plans by going and offering more money. The trick is, however, neither the bank nor the agent was going to tell us what this offer was. It could have been higher, lower, or it may not have even existed at all, and was simply a trick perpetuated by the lender to make us offer more money.

While I could see how this would work in the favor of the lender, it could backfire just as hard. If Customer A offered $145,000, and Customer B offered $120,000, the lender could call up (in the sense of passing notes in class) Customer A and say “Mister A, there’s been another offer that could be higher than yours, but maybe not, and we’re not saying cuz it’s a secret. Do you want to give us more money?” If Customer A (and with a name like that, you can imagine him doing something idiotic like this) says “How about $160,000?” and the lender approves, they make even more money. If Customer A says “Screw you!” the lender suddenly loses $25,000 more if they’re forced to go with Customer B, who’s looking pretty savvy by now.

I guess I better change my name to Customer A, Situation 1, because I made a higher offer.

It was a tough decision. On one hand, I really liked the house and had foolishly invested myself in it, mentally arranging it and deciding where my anime and computer was going. On the other hand, I didn’t want to feel like I was getting ripped off. The way Chuck was hyping the current state of the market, I thought I could buy a house for the change in my pocket. Getting this close to the asking price seemed foolish, especially after the twisted tactics the lender was pulling.

I went ahead and revised my offer, figuring we were all set. My reasoning was $160,000 was the next logical step when the house didn’t sell and the lender was forced to lower the price again, so it was better to get it over with and avoid costs from continuing to pile up. Unless there was a higher offer, I should be guaranteed a house, right?

You moron. More weeks passed, and while there was some optimistic talk, I received a call from Chuck as I was coming home from work. I told him to give me good news, a request he couldn’t honestly oblige. The offer was not only refused, but refused in a really idiot way.

In a striking display of business arrogance/stupidity, the lender not only refused the offer, but countered with an offer that was $15,000 more than the original asking price. Basically, the lender decided they wanted us to pay off the original debtors’ debts, to which we responded in the way we should have responded in the first place: “Screw you!”

If this doesn’t make your personal Top Ten of stupid business decisions, please commit yourself now. But before you sign those forms, I’ll assure your sanity that a possible reason the price went over the asking was the lender and the agent apparently don’t always communicate. So while the agent is off doing his own thing, the lender has a drastically different approach in mind. So it may be the lender that needs to be thrown in a padded cell for not keeping an eye on a $185,000 investment.

Of course, I was disappointed about the loss of this house, and began coming up with clever business solutions to try and salvage the situation. The one I focused on the most was agreeing to the price (this was more when the price was $170,000) in exchange for a no interest or low interest loan. While nay-sayers like my mother, who pretty much hates any idea I have that she wouldn’t have come up with, scoffed at this, I saw it as perfect business sense.

The property was only worth what a buyer was willing to pay, and that was $160,000. If this lender accepted my $170,000 interest-free loan idea, they would make an extra $10,000 and get rid of a potential money pit, and I would save thousands in interest. Of course, I knew lenders probably had a rigid set of policies in place that would deny such an arrangement, even if following the rules would cause them to lose money. In the end, nothing more is to be said about the house on Ponderosa, so we moved on.

Discouraged, we search for more houses, looking for something to satisfy our homeowner cravings. About a week later, my mother and I went to look at puppies (check out that article here), and during the conversation, the breeder told us they were moving and wanted to sell quickly because her husband was getting another job. There place was in a ritzy subdivision and the house was really nice. It would have been a short sale (gack!), and the owner didn’t really care who got it, so it would have been another pins-and-needles deal, but the payoff would have been a $200,000+ house for potentially $150,000.

The big problem was this was in a neighboring town, not Oregon, and this really stung. I seriously contemplated trying to get this place, even though I wouldn’t be in my hometown anymore, and I would know this. The subdivision was kind of out in TractorLand, limited any dog walking to that one neighborhood, which gets boring quickly, assuming I didn’t want to risk getting hit by a car and thrown into a muskrat-infested creek. Fortunately, Chuck swooped in and took us on another path.

He took us on a tour of houses spanning the heart of Oregon, a trip started on a bad note because my mother adopted a puppy that day and dumped him on me before leaving for her bowling league. After situating the new puppy, we began our journey. From west to east we moved, in the opposite fashion of a certain monkey king-infested monk, starting at the worst houses and moving to progressively better housing. I wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of living in the two most western ones, neither of which had a location I especially cared for. The first we saw was pretty gloomy and rundown, as if the concept of renovation was some kind of religious taboo for the previous owners, though the sum of rooms was respectable. The basement (which, if you were paying attention, is the most important part), was in the same spirit as the rest of the house, so we moved on.

The second house was old and kind of frightening, especially the weird bathroom upstairs that looked like some kind of execution chamber. I also got the weird feeling the kids who lived there previously were locked in their rooms for most of the time, but it may have just been the atmosphere. There was no real living room to speak of, just a walk-through with a fireplace that didn’t look very comfortable, a small kitchen, and rather eerie basement with a terrifying insulated chamber that confirms my suspicions that some really messed up stuff went down in that house.

We decided to move on from John Gacy’s summer home to the next one, a nice house located down the street from Christy’s subdivision. The contrast was startling: the home was kept up and still occupied, so it looked like a home and not like an abandoned cultists’ hideout. The kitchen, living room, family room, and backyard were all really nice. The upstairs was small, but not too bad. The basement, however, was one of the deal breakers.

The pictures online made the basement out to be some kind of swanky club, with colored lights and a bar. This was a fine illusion, because it was actually some guy’s sad attempt at pretending to be a DJ in his unfinished basement with Elvis mementos and hundreds of records piled on his makeshift DJ stand which I thought was the bar. Still, it wasn’t as bad as the time I saw a full-grown man riding one of these kids’ bicycles that was designed to look like a motorcycle, probably because his wife wouldn’t let him have a real one. This is coming from a guy who collects foam dart guns and watches Japanese cartoons.

Chuck thought the house was too expensive for what it was, and I wasn’t thrilled with the location (again, I’m picky), so it was off to the next one. This was in a neighborhood I was actually excited about, a semi-secluded road which was right in the middle of Oregon and seemed peaceful from the times I rode my bike through it on a lazy summer evening. Unfortunately, this house was a split-level.

A split-level, for those of you who live in a community who has more or less adhered to sane housing designs for the last hundred years, is a house that typically has three levels (basement, main floor, and upstairs) which positioned approximately half a story above each other. This provides the disadvantage of a two story house, the stairs, without the apparently undesirable advantage of having more rooms. So to get to your living room in the lower level or your bedroom in the upper, you have to use the stairs, and you can’t have any rooms directly above or below any of the other rooms, sort of like house design with DOOM’s WAD engine.

Besides getting around pesky local ordinances or building in uneven soil, there is absolutely no advantage to a split-level. If you want all your stuff on one level, get a ranch. If you want stairs, get a two-story. I absolutely hate these things because they make no sense, and the thought that someone voluntarily paid tens of thousands of dollars to have a split level built on a perfectly good piece of land which would have been better off, visually and functionally, as a landfill makes some important blood vessels in my brain threaten to burst and give my health insurance provider something to sweat about.

And this was a house that was in the running for purchase. It had a huge backyard, but that was about the only good thing about it. It was pretty small, didn’t appear to be updated ever (why mess with perfection?), and, most importantly, had no basement. So this one was a big pass.

We were down to the last house and getting nervous. At least I was, because I had a feeling all of the good houses in our price range were gone, and I either had to pick something I didn’t like or continue to live with my mother and risk having the market swing back up to a point where Cousin Earl’s raccoon hut was demanding upper six figures. Fortunately, this was the house Christy and I were excited about, because it was located in a nice subdivision down the street, and the price was just above $150,000, less than the Ponderosa.

I’ll save the best for last analogy and get to the point: this was it. The house was simple, with the main room containing the living room, kitchen (which looked great), and dining room in an L shape. There were three decent bedrooms, two subpar baths, and a laundry room. The backyard was small and had an in-ground right in the middle, something I could have done without, but the expensive vinyl fencing was a big plus. Not all that impressive ultimately, but the reason I fell for this house was the basement.

Half of it was finished, with the unfinished side sectioned off to the right with the furnace and water tank, plus an open crawlspace with a cement floor which was perfect for storage and protecting stored items from potential flooding. The left was a completely finished basement with a drop ceiling and inset lights, the kind of thing I would have done myself. I told people the house had a really awesome basement and something about a house above it.

The bad part was, this was a foreclosure, and the owners, who were reputed troublemakers, worked the place over by making off with everything that wasn’t nailed down and a lot of things that were, like the shelves, leaving unsightly holes in the walls. It didn’t help that they obviously cut a lot of costs in finishing the house, so you could say this was a fixer-upper.

Still, I had to have it, so after begging Christy to please let me spend my money on this place, she agreed, and we were off again to Chuck’s office, which I was beginning to regard with the same affection as an interrogation room. We were both tired of dealing with real estate, and I wanted to secure this place, so I did something I would regret for the rest of my days, something that could forever damage my reputation and make the remainder of my life a living Hell: I offered to pay full price.

Chuck wouldn’t hear it and put down an offer of $149,000, and asked for a home warranty. We left the office a nervous wreck, not knowing how this would turn out. I was certain a place like this would be in high demand, especially at the price, and I figured we were too late. There were already a couple of competing real estate agents’ cards on display in the house, marking their territory in what I desired to be my domain.

The next day, I was hanging out with a friend when Chuck called me telling me the other real estate company counter-offered… for an extra thousand dollars more. They accepted the request for a warranty, and all that was left was to cut through the usual red tape and pay up. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was over.

Next, I had to come up with the cash. After messing around with looking for loans, my mother offered to take all of her savings out and let me borrow it. After taking a penalty on taking out my CDs early, which turns out to is a good investment unless you need money for something and closing out a college fund, I presented the other agent with a check for just under $150,000 (after paying up some fees and getting deductions from others), and I was officially a home owner.

On the Next Episode of Inappropriate Homeowner Chris: Chris tackles the horrors of home renovation, utilities, and moving all of his stuff into the new house, a task he should have called in the Marines for. Stay tuned!