I haven't read all this thread but here is my thoughts/story. We bought our first hose here in Sandy UT. 5 bedrooms 2 baths ~ 2000 square foot.Good local <5 miles from Lcc for $140,000 back in 97. I did a lot of work on the house new woodwork, tile, carpet, new bathrooms, roof, skylights, rock front , new siding, xerascape etc. My wife wasn't happy here any more, slightly busy street, no master bedroom bathroom and her pack rat husband had amassed a lot of stuff cluttering the house. At the markets peak I think it was possibly worth 310,000ish. Our neighbor bought a similar house slightly larger to ours for 328k. He lost his job and his girlfriend and the bank foreclosed and booted him last week. He tried to short sell and it definately hurt our chances of selling our house.
A couple years ago we started looking. We found a perfect fixer upper 7 bedrooms 3 baths 3500 square ft' ,dead end st,. big lot, water rights to a creek, a mile closer to the lcc. Everything we were looking for including
70's bubble gum shag carpet.;) The old lady who owned it had been trying to sell for a year already starting at a 382,000 price. Basically she had done nothing to this house since she had it except for a new furnace and roof. Original linoleum, kitchen, different shades of cat piss smelling 70's shag carpet. Last fall she was down to 315ish and we offered 295ish she came back at 310. Cool see ya in the spring when we will offer you even less.
This spring we signed a contract for 289ish and listed our house for 264ish
we averaged 2 showings a week through the summer with mixed reviews.
I think there were a couple new families with young children who loved it but wanted 3 bedrooms up vs the 2 up 3 down we have. We had worked a deal with the same re agent and during the summer we would drop 7k and the old lady would drop 5k. We dropped a bit more as the Mrs. really wanted this house.
Just as we were about to pull the plug for the winter a maggot RTR was looking for his 1st house in our location, decided to put in an offer he came in low and once again the old lady didn't want to play ball. We came down he came up and finally the old lady came down a little. We where still ~ 2k from where we wanted to be. Basically the cost of tearing out and replacing out 7 bedrooms of catpiss reeking carpet. We shopped around and Met Life was willing to give us 4.8% financing and waive a lot of closing costs because all our insurance is with them, so dicking around arguing over 2 k was gonna be futile if interest rates came up. I'm not sure exactly what the final prices came out to be. I let my wife wear the financial pants in the family so I can wear ski bibs and waders;). I'm stoked a maggot brought my house for a good price. I'm super stoked to have new crib although I think it just might cut into my skiing this season. It's gonna take a lot of work but, I've spent a good part of my adult life in the trades and enjoy working on our house for my boss/spancer.
I don't know if this new house will be as good of investment as the first one but, I'm not real concerned, as we don't plan on selling/moving for a while and the potential is certainly there.
So I'm not seeing this "crash" thing as such a bad thing personally. We sold our house for less than we wanted but got a new one for less than we wanted.
Lastly huge props to Ryan Kirkham of
http://www.kirkhamre.com/ this guy busted ass to make this deal work and did a lot for RTR.
There are probably some good SLC maggot real estate agents and I would have loved to use one of them but we worked a great deal with Ryan and he came through.
Oh yeah this thread needs bubble gum shag carpet stoke
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y19...um/sd072-1.jpg
Fuck yeah the skituning/flytying man cave is gonna be sweet unless I'm tripping then it could get ugly.
sorry for a long post/blog probably could have made this a thread and may and just link here