Beginning the house hunting process

[justbroke]

Congratulations shipo. Did you say you were moving to the Maryland area?

[shipo]

Update...

After six months of (initially) passive and then active searching for a new home, yesterday not one, but two new listings popped up, both of which tick off enough boxes for us to put in an offer. I had my MLO pull the trigger today for the prequalification and within a few hours we were preapproved and ready to go. I honestly expect to need to get into a bidding war for the one we like the most; fortunately we're preapproved for quite a bit more than what would be a very high agreed upon price.

If all goes well we'll close on the condo early May, have contractors in there to repaint the entire place and to rip out the carpeting and VPL (Vinyl Plank Flooring) which I detest, and lay down wood flooring throughout the main living areas. With any luck, we could be moved in by the end of May.

[shipo]

Started the prequalification process today...

Here's an interesting spin on getting a mortgage compared to my last update; we just found out a close family member passed the Mortgage Loan Officer exam last year and is now working with a mortgage company, so we're giving him the first swing of the bat at getting us a mortgage.

Today we filled out the necessary information online to begin the prequalification process and came away with a few observations:

• Our last mortgage application was over 20 years ago; my how things have changed. I know, shocking; right?
• Note to self, having assets spread around across well over a dozen different accounts is a pain in the hind parts when applying for a mortgage; it may be time to consolidate a little.
• I fortunately anticipated virtually all of the information we needed for the application, so the process was more or less cut and paste; even still it took the better part of a half hour.
• It has been over a decade since we sold our last house, but even still, it felt kind of funny answering "No" to the "Are you a first time home buyer?" question. That said, things have changed so much I do feel like a newb when it comes to the home buying process.
• I quickly looked at what potential benefits we can glean from being a "First Time Homebuyer" in Montgomery County, Maryland; I'll need to focus on that this weekend because the brief look-see presented me with more information than I had time to wrap my brain around.

I'll keep y'all posted on the progress.

[Zombie13]

Thanks! We're house hunting in Gaithersburg, MD where our daughter and her fiancé relocated to last summer, so at this point it is starting to look like I'll never make it to our Englewood office, especially because Google has reached out to me a couple times since December to get me to apply for a job with them.

Excellent! And good luck with the Google interviews!

[shipo]

shipo - WOW Congratulations and good luck with the house hunt! If you do make a trip - Englewood CO and nearby areas are really nice; Littleton and Centennial especially - just my personal, unjaded opinion. If you do go, make sure you hydrate a lot beforehand. I had headaches and felt sleepy for months until my body adjusted to the mile high altitude: learned to make drinking water often, a habit.

Thanks! We're house hunting in Gaithersburg, MD where our daughter and her fiancé relocated to last summer, so at this point it is starting to look like I'll never make it to our Englewood office, especially because Google has reached out to me a couple times since December to get me to apply for a job with them.

[Zombie13]

shipo - WOW Congratulations and good luck with the house hunt! If you do make a trip - Englewood CO and nearby areas are really nice; Littleton and Centennial especially - just my personal, unjaded opinion. If you do go, make sure you hydrate a lot beforehand. I had headaches and felt sleepy for months until my body adjusted to the mile high altitude: learned to make drinking water often, a habit.

[justbroke]

I don't know. I looked at PenFed/NFCU but looked at Guaranteed Rate Affinity (GR) and my local credit union. The local credit union was horrible. Poor communication, poor systems, and poor organization. I switched to GR and told them I only had 30 days to close and the CU messed everything up. GR worked with me even at 9PM on a weekend.I was through final approval in 18 days and clear to close on day 21. GR worked a miracle and I've never seen something be CTC that fast (it's possible but never for me). In fact I had conditional approval the next afternoon from applying with just 3 conditions.

I wonder if they're getting NFCU mixed up with another CU that was horrible to work with. Small mortgage teams are problematic as I have learned. A larger organization has multiple people working your file.

[shipo]

Something I forgot to ask...

It has been over 20 years since we've applied for a mortgage and the financial world has changed a lot; as mentioned in my first post, I recently joined NFCU as they seem to consistently have some of the lowest mortgage rates. With this in mind, while I was talking with our new real estate agent earlier this week, I told her I was inclined to use NFCU for the mortgage and she strongly recommended against using them, telling us stories of lost sales because they were slow, disorganized, and difficult to deal with.

Do any of y'all have any insight on whether using Navy is a good move, or if, as she recommended, I should go with a small local mortgage outfit?

[shipo]

Extreme is my friend who owns and leases-out three condos in downtown Chicago. Parking spaces are $150K each (they bought 5 and rent out all five). They rent out the parking spaces at $600/month. I think the COA fee is over $1,000/month for each unit. Crazy, crazy, crazy.

Your fee seems reasonable if you use the amenities.

LOL, I paid $100 per month to park my car in a dirt alley in Chicago back in 1985.

And yeah, the amenities will get heavy usage.

[justbroke]

Extreme is my friend who owns and leases-out three condos in downtown Chicago. Parking spaces are $150K each (they bought 5 and rent out all five). They rent out the parking spaces at $600/month. I think the COA fee is over $1,000/month for each unit. Crazy, crazy, crazy.

Your fee seems reasonable if you use the amenities.

[shipo]

Lot parking is free and garage parking is something you purchase with the unit and/or from other owners for a 1-time fee. That said, the HOA does cover the maintenance all of the grounds, including the outside lot and garage, all building maintenance, apparently including inside the unit, posh common areas like a gym, pool, library, small conference center, the grounds, and amenities in the larger Kentlands community. Is it worth $700 per month? Maybe not fully, but I don't think it is too extreme.

[justbroke]

Crazy HOA fees. I hope they come with something for free (Internet, parking, basic cable). I was looking at some RVHome sites and see lot rent as high as $900/month. My brain just can't fathom that amount unless they have some really nice amenities and services.

[shipo]

House hunting update...

After a busy holiday season and a professionally slammed January (in addition to doctor visits and surgery), we contacted a real estate agent in Gaithersburg this week and officially kicked off the active shopping phase of our hunt.

After hours online looking at the various offerings in the area, as much as I'd like one of the three-floor townhomes in the area with a small back yard and a detached 2-car garage, I think those units are just a hair above what I feel comfortable spending, what with all of the traveling and such my wife and I want to do. Basically ruling out a townhome means focusing on a condo similar to the one we saw back in December, and while the unit itself is two- to three-hundred thousand less than a townhome of a similar size, these condos come with HOA fees north of $700 per month, so the monthly delta isn't as steep as one might think based upon the market values of the units.

Long story short, ten years years ago when we filed our bankruptcies I seriously questioned whether we'd ever get to the point where we could own our own home.

[shipo]

Our future son-in-law grew up in the Gaithersburg area (where he and our daughter relocated to this last summer after she graduated with her Masters in Economics) and they are wanting us to relocate near them, so the region is pretty much already picked. We were down there last weekend and saw a place which would be ideal which had sold a few months back in one of the upscale condominium complexes, and by ideal I mean, over 2,000 square feet, three bedrooms, one of which already has very nice built in desks and shelving for an office, a large porch on the third floor with access from the living room and two of the bedrooms, two storage lockers, and three parking spots in the garage.

As for me, nope, not retiring anytime soon; that said, my only requirement is to live near a major airport as my company has only one tiny office in Englewood, CO; a place I have yet to visit even though I've been with the company for over two and a half years.

[Barbisi]

Are you familiar with the vicinity around DC, shipo ? If so, you might be able to find a suitable property to buy in the time frame you mentioned. But, if you're not, you might consider renting for a year to learn your way around the neighborhoods there. Are you working remotely or have you both retired? If not, you definitely should consider commute time.
We had to move twice from the original Puyallup rental (to S Renton, and finally to Issaquah) to finally get comfortably situated, even though my husband's commute will be 90 minutes round trip when he returns to in person work next year. In our case it is worth longer travel time to live in a cleaner and nicer town with "mighty amenities" (desirable shopping, restaurants, and grocery stores choices in one smaller concentrated area).
Compared to DC, the Seattle/Bellevue suburbs may or may not be absurdly more expensive, but to us it would be suicide to buy a ridiculously overpriced "hovel" (no decent houses exist here for much under a million dollars) and as our years of home ownership were mostly defined by BK13, we currently have no desire to own at the present time.
Also, prices may go down along with interest rates, so that is something to think through.
Good luck on your relocation and Happy Holidays!