House Hunting in Fresno

WARNING: Lots of reading, but if your interested.....

Okay lets just tell you about my Fresno trip, before time gets away from me and I never do it.  My dad was gracious enough to fly both Talmage and I into Utah, and then drive with me to Fresno and back.  As well as put up with me for a whole, emotional, week of house hunting. (Thanks Dad I love you!)   

Talmage was passed around  the whole 9 days and 8 nights that we were gone.  It broke my heart! Trust me...this was the longest I had ever been apart from him.  He went with Nali for 2 nights, with Nana for 3 nights, with Aunt Ash and Uncle Bill for 1 night, and back to Nana for 2 more nights. (Thanks for watching him ya'll. I love you!) Despite our talks on the phone every day and our Skype call, he was clearly mad at me for leaving him.  

When I first saw him after the long week he wouldn't come to me, smile, hug or kiss me, he instead threw a tennis ball at my face.  It took him until later that evening, when I opened the windows and blinds so he could hear the river and see the stars as he lay next to me in bed, that he rolled over and gave me a tight hug and said, "I happy mom" (which I am coming to understand is his way of saying "I love you")  and then rolled back over and went to sleep.  According to the Grandparents and Aunties, Talmage had quite a blast all week.  He was outside a LOT (got nice and tan), played with all his cousins (which he adores), teased Coco and Sage (my mom and brother's dogs) and got to see and do all kinds of new and fun things all week long (like sharks at the aquarium and jumping on the trampoline for hours).  After hearing that, I didn't feel too bad for leaving him......except when Ashley told me that he woke up 3 times one night asking for "Mom" and looking around the house for me. We are back to normal now and he loves me, so I finally recovered.

Onto my adventures.....My Dad and I left Saturday, drove 5 hours to St. George, rested up that night at his house (BEST SLEEP EVER!!!!) with no toddler kicking my face, complete darkness, complete quiet, perfect temperature, and a comfortable bed. We got a late start the next day but drove 9 more hours, getting into Fresno around 8 p.m.  The sun was still up and so I could see the city pretty well.  I was very excited as we drove in, it was more than I was expecting.  It had nice smooth roads, lots of pines growing every where and had very clean streets and neighborhoods.  Of course every city in every state in the country has it's bad neighborhoods and bad parts of town, but these good neighborhoods lasted for miles.  It made me happy to see the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges in the distance too, helping me determine East from West, like I was used to doing growing up.  I was also impressed with all the agriculture and fresh farmers markets everywhere.  I got a list of farmers markets to go visit once I move out there, I am so excited!  I love fresh, locally grown fruit.  It reminds me of going to my Grandpa Burt's house as a kid and picking raspberries off the vine or peaches out of the tree and eating them with some vanilla ice cream.  They also have a lot of nut and honey stands.  Needless to say, the smells, feel and look of the place instantly spoke to my heart and I already felt good about calling this new place my home. 

The rest of the week was a whirlwind of; meeting with the realtor, learning and getting educated on the real estate market in Fresno, driving from house to house (some wonderful some disgusting), checking out the different neighborhoods, checking out downtown, locating Cody's hospitals, locating the Fresno Temple, checking out rentals as well, and taking one night off to drive up to Shaver Lake with Dad.  Cody flew in late on Thursday night and had to leave very early Saturday morning, so his 2 days were business only.  I had narrowed down the house options by the time he got there, but his time was spent looking at those houses, checking out the rentals I found, discovering and being disappointed in an upside down real estate market (not what we were expecting), crunching new numbers and figuring  out our new budget, and then of course us putting three different offers in.  What can I say, what would I do without my Cody.  

Here are few pictures to break up all the writing. 

Way up to Shaver Lake

Cute little town in the hilltops by Shaver Lake.  I thought gas prices were bad in Milwaukee, look at California's.

It was 20 to 30 degrees cooler up in the mountains, for good reason, we went from sea level to close to 5,000 feet in 45 minutes.

Love all the big Sequoia's

I will attempt to explain the craziness of the house market that is Fresno. Issue #1: Typically, from what I grew up understanding about buying is that houses are usually listed at or a little above the value of the house and then there is room to negotiate down (closing costs, this or that needs fixing etc). In Fresno it is backwards, the sellers list their homes under value, getting a swarm of buyers to come look, and then there becomes a bidding war and no room for negotiating, because more often then not they take the highest and best or cash offer.  In our case, with our 3 offers we weren't necessarily outbid, but they took the cash offers over our higher offer.  We were expecting room to negotiate closing costs, but discovered we were going to have to pay all our closing costs as well as over what we were planning on, because of the bidding wars. Issue #2: Typically house turn over rates go for months and there is plenty of time to look at a house, decide if you liked it and then place an offer.  In Fresno, the house turn over rate is 42 days!  For example, I looked at a house on Monday that had been on the market for only 5 days, I liked it, but before I could even show it to Cody by Thursday it was already sold.  Issue #3: Short Sales!  About 80% of the houses are short sales, it sounds great right?  Not what the name means.  A short sale is basically an asset manager taking over a house and evicting the people from it because they couldn't make their payments.  This asset manager sales it for way short of what it is worth (hence the term short sale) but he also gets commission for each month he holds onto a home.  Also, there may be multiple asset managers over looking one house.  Let's say we did find a house that was a short sale, it could take up to a year to get into it and that wasn't even guaranteed because all 4 or 5 asset managers had to agree on you.  We opted out of any houses that were short sales, we did not want to deal with that, which brings us to... Issue #4: Limited options.  Plug in all houses in Fresno and Clovis (where we are looking) we pull up lets say 1,000 homes listed.  Plug in our price range, we drop down to 500 listings.  Plug in no Short sales, drop down to 100 listings. Plug in our stipulations ( 3 beds, 2 baths, yadda yadda), and we literally have 42 homes to choose from.....But some are not in very good neighborhoods, so lets plug in the two desirable neighborhoods we want to live in and we had maybe 12 homes to look at, 8 of the 12 homes were available by the time Cody got there.  Only 3 were what we actually wanted (despite some major improvements on one of them, and a higher price on another). Issue #5: People paying cash vs people like us with a good honest salary, qualified to make our monthly mortgage payments. Making it impossible to get our offers accepted when big, wealthy people drop in with a hat full of cash and snatch the house right from underneath us.

Here were two of the three homes we placed offers on.
Option 1: REO bank owned, the fixer upper (trust me this one was disgusting inside), great neighborhood, best price, we lost it because someone paid all cash for it. Sad day.

Option 2: Traditional sale, the flip house, move in ready, good neighborhood, at our max budget, we offered more, but they took the cash offer instead of ours, Same thing happened with house 3 accept our offer was a day too late.

You are probably asking, "What do we have going for us? And why buy a house, is it even worth going through all that crap?"

What we have going for us:

1: Interest rates are 3.76% lowest in history (making owning much more affordable in the long haul)

2: We are qualified to own, with a good standing job (banks like seeing people who can make their payments and so do the sellers)

3: A real estate agent who has an in with some of the "big dawgs" the big "flippers" will you, and can make things happen EARLY for us.  When we get out to Fresno she is going to show us houses that aren't even listed yet, so we can place offers before any one else.  This might be our only chance.

4: We have a little Irish luck in our blood, (Cody is part Irish).  

5: God is looking out for us I am sure, if it is meant for us to get into a house, he will help us. If not, we must accept this.

Why buy?

Because renting is just as expensive as owning if not more costly in the long run (REALLY) minus the hassle of maintenance and a few other costs (taxes, interest, etc). When you rent, you throw away your money every month on something you don't own and can never sell for a profit.  Life style is nicer when renting though, you don't have to deal with a yard, or plumbing or issues of that sort.  

BUT.......

 With a home, we get equity out of it, the money we spend every month goes towards paying for something we OWN.  In the end, we can either rent it out and make a profit or sell it and either break even or make a profit as well.  We feel like this is the best choice for us.  Not to mention I have been dying for my own space!  To create my own designs and colors of my own, decorate how I want.  No more listening to our upstairs neighbors having intercourse and no more old (probably led based), used bathrooms and windowsills for Talmage to lick or get into.  To do with it what we want.  To plant fruit trees and rose bushes, and to have a fenced in yard for the kids to expend energy safely while I make dinner.  So many more reasons, I even am okay having to do a little yard work and mowing the lawn...I like mowing.  We have 5, maybe more years in Fresno, so we figure now is the time to buy.  Lets hope that we CAN.