As I mentioned in my first post, my husband and I bought our first home - a condo - six years ago in February 2002. Here's our story...
Not even six months after we were married, my husband declared that he was ready to leave Manhattan and move up to Norwalk where many of his friends were living. Now, I loved living in "the city", but my dear hubby hated it more than I loved it and since I love him much more than I love New York and the high NYC rent, I went along with the plan.
Our original plan was to rent an apartment so we could get used to the area. We didn't even think about buying until the first real estate agent we talked to asked us if we had been qualified for a mortgage. Boy was she a smart one  - we got on the phone with the mortgage broker she recommended and were qualified for a mortgage right away just in case we saw something we wanted to buy. Although we were qualified for up to $300,000 we told her we only wanted to spend about $150 - $200K to stay well within our budget.
Well, we must have had the word "sucker" painted on our foreheads in some special ink only she could see because the first day we met her she took us to see a few dumpy rentals, a few OK condos in our preferred price range and then made our last stop a brand new condo complex where the units were priced from $250K and up. She told us that she knew these new condos were more than we wanted to spend, but they were still within the range of what we could afford and the mortgage payments would still be less than our NYC rent for twice as much space.
After 30 minutes with us at the Open House for the new complex, she left us on our own because she had another appointment. Well, she had done her job because we were sold. It had that "new home" smell and all we could think was, "it's brand new, we don't need to do anything but move in and nothing can go wrong." (See how naive we were!) We stayed there for 5 hours calling my parents for advice (they had bought 3 homes over the years), deciding which unit we wanted and then went down to the office and wrote up an offer with the builder's agent. Our agent wasn't even there...we called her after we had written up the offer to tell her what we had done.
She got away with so little work - we must have been the easiest clients she ever had. Not only did she sell us something our first day out looking, but she sold us something for almost twice as much as we wanted to spend and we didn't see her again until the walk-through on the day of the closing. Great for her...not so great for us.
Here were our big rookie mistakes:
- We didn't even attempt to negotiate the builder's price, ask for upgrades or changes to the standard fixtures. The builder's agent told us the price was what was listed and we believed him (we later learned that other buyers had negotiated lower prices and some upgrades).
- We didn't do a Home Inspection - it was new, we thought, and the builder has to give us a 1 year warranty, so what could be wrong? Even though nothing major has gone wrong in 6 years - a home inspection would have found some issues that we didn't find until well after the 1st year and would have taught us some valuable information about home maintenance.
- We didn't really explore all of our options and we could have gotten more for less.
- We had no idea how many things could change or go wrong with a new condo association. Our common charges jumped up by $20/month as soon as the association was formed, we've had numerous increases since then totaling over $80/month along with paying almost an extra year's worth of common charges in special assessments for emergency repairs and budget shortfalls over the 6 years we've lived here. There's no guarantee that things like that wouldn't have happened in a more established complex, but a long financial history gives more chance for things to remain stable.
We're still living in the same condo six years later and it's been a good home for us and our son, but there are many things I wish I had known before we took the leap into investing our savings and committing to a $250,000 mortgage (did I mention that we laughed at the closing table when we realized that a bank thought we could actually pay back a quarter of a million dollars!). Even though it's all worked-out fine and we'll make a nice gain on our investment when we sell it (stay tuned, that's coming soon!), I still wonder from time-to-time where we would be if we had bought something different or taken a bit more time to make sure we were making the right decision for us at the time. I've learned from our mistakes and I pass that information along to you so that you can learn from it to. Happy House Hunting!
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