irvine_home_owner_IHB
New member
So we've been looking to buy a bigger house for the last 2.5 years. We were looking at the new communities like Woodbury, Portola Springs and the much IHB-loved Columbus Grove. I found this site during the summer and I thought I could find information on house pricing and bargains... but what I got was not what I was expecting.
At first I just read threads about new community pricing and even got into a thread concerning the 3 Prado models in Portola Springs (Prado ended up not building their community and so those 3 model homes were the only ones available and they put them up for a bidding-type sale). I also had a rough start in my wishlist thread (<a href="http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewthread/3024/">http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewthread/3024/</a>)... I just wanted to share the features that I was personally looking for in my hunt to get a bigger house and was met with quite a bit of... well... misunderstanding.
But thanks to PeterUK... I stuck around and started reading the blog and other threads about prices, owning and... gasp... renting.
I never really considered renting a house because like many... I've always been brainwashed with "The American Dream" of owning your home. So I necroe'd this thread with this post:
<a href="http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewreply/68607/">http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewreply/68607/</a>
And that's when the detox started. I started running numbers and looking at historical data. I had several long talks with my wife about how all these homes we have been looking at are really overpriced and for the same monthly, we could probably rent a nicer home (intro to rental parity). I did some math on our current house as our plan was to rent it out and rent elsewhere but the numbers didn't work. The current rental rates for comparable homes did not cover our expenses (another confirmation of rental parity). We could probably make up the difference but then it became an issue of whether we should continue to put money into a devaluating asset.
I PM'ed IR and after reading IPO's and usc's home selling threads... we made the decision to just sell our current home at a loss before we ended up underwater on our loan. We had a conventional 80% LTV loan but at the projected price drops... we could be upside down in a year or two. I think the biggest impetus was that even with our loss, if the predictions hold, we could probably rebuy a home similar to ours in a few years for the same amount as our loan.
So after a PM to IPO... we embarked on our way to listing our house. We used the same agent we have been using for the last 12 years... which would have been okay except that he doesn't live in Irvine and was moving out of the area which made it more difficult. I ended up having to do much of the prep work which included finding a stager and the various service people to make our house ready for sale. If we ever do it again, I would probably use an area agent (like IR2) who is readily available, is very familiar with the neighborhood and is willing to sod our lawn (hehe!).
The biggest decision we had to make in regards to prepping our house was to use a stager or not. This was hard since my wife did most of the decorating decisions and paying an outsider to tell her how to show her home was not an ideal situation. After some exhaustive googlework... I emailed several stagers and scheduled interviews with them. It was important that my wife meet these people to ease her doubts. I think what most people wonder about when it comes to staging is pricing. Most of the stagers we talked to will charge .50 to $1.00 per square foot depending on how much furniture/accessories they have to bring in on their own. And don't be fooled by HGTV... most stagers merely accesorize and arrange what you currently have or what they bring in. They don't repaint, replace your countertops or landscape your yard. Any of that stuff you have to do yourself or hire someone else to do it (stagers usually have referrals for that too). Lucky for us, we don't have many things on the wall and we just recently bought furniture in the last 2 years so the stager we hired was able to use most of what we had and they just brought in mirrors, paintings, bath towels, candles, silk plants and various odd and ends to make the place look more homey.
In addition to the stager, we had to do other housework such as repainting one of our kid rooms to be more neutral (we used the same neutral beige paint we had throughout the house), cleaning up our front landscape and regrouting various bath and kitchen areas. For anyone who is selling their home, if you have tile showers, bathtubs or kitchen countertops... regrouting is probably the best thing you can do if you can't replace. I don't know how many times I've looked at someone's bathroom to be repulsed by moldy showers and tubs. And if you have an older kitchen with tile, regrouting and refreshing the grout makes it look so much better.
With all that being done... the last decision had to be made... how much to list it for. Even if we listed it for what we bought it for in July of 2005, it would still lose money because we had put about $20k of improvements in (flooring, paint etc) and then there is all the sales expsenses. And then there was the whole do we list it higher than our absolute bottom due to underbids or use range pricing (like usc). In the end, from my sister's suggestion, we decided to leverage the superstition of the FCB... we used lucky numbers and a listing price lower than the comparables but higher than our bottom line.
We knew that we had to move fast so it was a very hectic time for us... from that first PM to IR, to prepping/staging and to our first listing date (and first open house)... we did that all in 3 weeks.
Next: Part 2 - Can We Beat the IPO Over/Under?
<a href="http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewthread/4023">http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewthread/4023</a>
At first I just read threads about new community pricing and even got into a thread concerning the 3 Prado models in Portola Springs (Prado ended up not building their community and so those 3 model homes were the only ones available and they put them up for a bidding-type sale). I also had a rough start in my wishlist thread (<a href="http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewthread/3024/">http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewthread/3024/</a>)... I just wanted to share the features that I was personally looking for in my hunt to get a bigger house and was met with quite a bit of... well... misunderstanding.
But thanks to PeterUK... I stuck around and started reading the blog and other threads about prices, owning and... gasp... renting.
I never really considered renting a house because like many... I've always been brainwashed with "The American Dream" of owning your home. So I necroe'd this thread with this post:
<a href="http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewreply/68607/">http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewreply/68607/</a>
And that's when the detox started. I started running numbers and looking at historical data. I had several long talks with my wife about how all these homes we have been looking at are really overpriced and for the same monthly, we could probably rent a nicer home (intro to rental parity). I did some math on our current house as our plan was to rent it out and rent elsewhere but the numbers didn't work. The current rental rates for comparable homes did not cover our expenses (another confirmation of rental parity). We could probably make up the difference but then it became an issue of whether we should continue to put money into a devaluating asset.
I PM'ed IR and after reading IPO's and usc's home selling threads... we made the decision to just sell our current home at a loss before we ended up underwater on our loan. We had a conventional 80% LTV loan but at the projected price drops... we could be upside down in a year or two. I think the biggest impetus was that even with our loss, if the predictions hold, we could probably rebuy a home similar to ours in a few years for the same amount as our loan.
So after a PM to IPO... we embarked on our way to listing our house. We used the same agent we have been using for the last 12 years... which would have been okay except that he doesn't live in Irvine and was moving out of the area which made it more difficult. I ended up having to do much of the prep work which included finding a stager and the various service people to make our house ready for sale. If we ever do it again, I would probably use an area agent (like IR2) who is readily available, is very familiar with the neighborhood and is willing to sod our lawn (hehe!).
The biggest decision we had to make in regards to prepping our house was to use a stager or not. This was hard since my wife did most of the decorating decisions and paying an outsider to tell her how to show her home was not an ideal situation. After some exhaustive googlework... I emailed several stagers and scheduled interviews with them. It was important that my wife meet these people to ease her doubts. I think what most people wonder about when it comes to staging is pricing. Most of the stagers we talked to will charge .50 to $1.00 per square foot depending on how much furniture/accessories they have to bring in on their own. And don't be fooled by HGTV... most stagers merely accesorize and arrange what you currently have or what they bring in. They don't repaint, replace your countertops or landscape your yard. Any of that stuff you have to do yourself or hire someone else to do it (stagers usually have referrals for that too). Lucky for us, we don't have many things on the wall and we just recently bought furniture in the last 2 years so the stager we hired was able to use most of what we had and they just brought in mirrors, paintings, bath towels, candles, silk plants and various odd and ends to make the place look more homey.
In addition to the stager, we had to do other housework such as repainting one of our kid rooms to be more neutral (we used the same neutral beige paint we had throughout the house), cleaning up our front landscape and regrouting various bath and kitchen areas. For anyone who is selling their home, if you have tile showers, bathtubs or kitchen countertops... regrouting is probably the best thing you can do if you can't replace. I don't know how many times I've looked at someone's bathroom to be repulsed by moldy showers and tubs. And if you have an older kitchen with tile, regrouting and refreshing the grout makes it look so much better.
With all that being done... the last decision had to be made... how much to list it for. Even if we listed it for what we bought it for in July of 2005, it would still lose money because we had put about $20k of improvements in (flooring, paint etc) and then there is all the sales expsenses. And then there was the whole do we list it higher than our absolute bottom due to underbids or use range pricing (like usc). In the end, from my sister's suggestion, we decided to leverage the superstition of the FCB... we used lucky numbers and a listing price lower than the comparables but higher than our bottom line.
We knew that we had to move fast so it was a very hectic time for us... from that first PM to IR, to prepping/staging and to our first listing date (and first open house)... we did that all in 3 weeks.
Next: Part 2 - Can We Beat the IPO Over/Under?
<a href="http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewthread/4023">http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/forums/viewthread/4023</a>
