patrick.net

Peter P,

Well, I won't move until I have too - or the landlord sells, and then I'll move into an apartment complex until I'm ready to buy.

My problem is I'm in a month to month lease, which has never been an issue until now.

However, everyone that owns in this area are all saying that this area never goes down, or doesn't get affected much - in which case, the landlord will hopefully be very complacent and not want to sell before the market tanks - by then, we should be in a position to decide on buying something.

LILLL,

Do you really want to buy the house you're in? If your landlord is like mine, they spend the least amount of money they can on the property and the termites have been having a huge party for years. You ideally want to (or rather I do) buy from someone who's been living in their house, and maintaining it (and maybe improving it) over the years.

Is condomization some kind of birth control?

Oops. Should have said:

The incentivization of condominiumization has diminished. :)

Then, if she does try to sell, see if you can't get her to pay you for the hassle and expense of moving before your lease is up.t

I suppose you can't get an agent to give you an estimate of what the house is worth - or seeing what they are advising their clients at the minute?

If not much has sold in your area - do you think this one will? The realtors may lower the valuation for the house slightly anyway, compared to others, because it is a rental property - maybe.

You could bandie about the words lease to own options maybe, and send her off to investigate the idea or say that you want to investigate it as an option for you - that might put her off for a couple of weeks at least, then I believe sales taper off now, as everyone settles in for the school year.

Alternatively get caller ID and don't answer any calls from her (switch the answering machine off), she can't show any realtors around or access the property without 24 hours notice (I believe).

Alternatively get caller ID and don’t answer any calls from her (switch the answering machine off), she can’t show any realtors around or access the property without 24 hours notice (I believe).

Why?

LILLL,

I don't know much about lease to buy, so I have no idea whether it is a good idea or not -

*Not investment advice

Peter P,

If the landlord can't notify you that she wants to come round and go through the house, then she can't show the realtors round (24 hour notice is normally in teh lease agreements), so it might take longer for valuation, the housing market may have worsened a bit more by then.....comps might be lower.......I suppose they could do a drive by though.

LILLL,

Hopefully someone will have a better suggestion for you, mine are a little lame....

Too late for me, my rent just went up this month....

If the landlord can’t notify you that she wants to come round and go through the house, then she can’t show the realtors round (24 hour notice is normally in teh lease agreements), so it might take longer for valuation, the housing market may have worsened a bit more by then…..comps might be lower…….I suppose they could do a drive by though.

The landlord can just leave a note on your door. Sometimes, unnecessary opposition will harm you. It is better to just follow the flow.

Peter P,

Yes, they can leave a note, but how many landlords use that as their first line of contacting you?

Besides, I've already said my ideas are lame, but if someone wants to stall that's one way of doing it. Personally, I normally let the landlord come round even if he's only given me 15 minutes notice.

LOL!

You're obviously a lot tidier than we are - our place normally looks like a tornado went through it. The LLs would need to give at least 24 hours notice, if they ever want to sell it! Staged, schmaged...

LILLL:

I may be wrong, and I'm sure someone will correct me if so, but as you've signed a tenenacy agreement for 2 years, the place is essentially 'yours' for that period.
Even if your LL sells the place, it has to be on the proviso that you have a tenenacy until 2008 (or whenever) and the buyer cannot evict you until your tenancy is up.
Essentially, they can buy the place as 'tenant occupied', which would assume that they are doing so for the rental imcome.

As I said, I could very well be wrong. Hopefully someone who knows their *rse from their elbow will post and let us know....

hee hee, i'm posting from my new imate pda phone... now I can access patrick.net continually from anywhere - it's like a perpetual online heroin fix...

i thought it did, heh -- i was hoping to be able to dictate straight to patrick.net in the car...

seriously, it's got GPRS, wifi and bluetooth.. and GSM of course...

voice to text might strain the memory/processing capabilities of a PDA...could do basic voice recognition dialling, i guess...

Bap33,

You do know Michael Savage is a stage name for Michael Alan Weiner. I'd think you'd hate this guy from many comments you've made around here earlier. I mean this guy is an environmentalist, animal rights supporter, has a PhD from UC Berkeley, and wrote books on herbalism (not as Mike Savage, of course).

He hasn't said very nice things about Olly either. Do you just like him because he encourages violence against gays and muslims as part of his radio shtick?

In a radio interview with Jerry Falwell on April 29, 2004, he opposed Falwell's view that people will go to hell if they do not believe in the doctrine that Jesus is the unique son of God. He refuses to believe that good people who do not accept Jesus will go to hell, while unrepentant, sinful Christians will go to heaven. Savage believes that religion is "a wheel". At the center of the wheel is God, and the five "spokes" of the wheel are the world's major religions: Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. He believes in Universal reconciliation, which means that everybody will eventually go to heaven.

as long as it's all savage, i don't care who says it...

what's ted nugent all about, just stumbled on his wiki entry by accident...

I occasionally post the rising sophistication of the SpamBots. Here's a great example of a SpamBot that got caught up in our filter, but made a damned good attempt at contextually adjusting to the going conversation:

Origins of the Welfare State in America
Standard theory views government as functional: a social need arises, and government, semi-automatically, springs up to fill that need. The analogy rests on the market economy: demand gives rise to supply (e.g., a demand for cream cheese will result in a gambling sport of gambling sport cheese on the market).

The gambling terms were links to online gaming sites.

Frighteningly, that spambot sounds a tad Postmodern, don't you think? How long until a SpamBot is indistinguishable form a social sciences thesis?

hope you thwacked the bot til it was dead...

altho it was semi-educational this time... maybe the bots could generate the equivalent of a college degree given enough keywords -- could end up graduating from the University of Spam...

but don't forget the sokalian postmodern essay generator is always there for you... http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo

I mean this guy is an environmentalist, animal rights supporter

I guess he is not a food supporter. :(

hee hee, i’m posting from my new imate pda phone… now I can access patrick.net continually from anywhere - it’s like a perpetual online heroin fix…

Cool... is that the one with slide-out keyboard?

We're stuck in the same rental conundrum. Rents going up, LL wants us out because I have option to extend lease until 08 at current rent (with an under-priced "exercise" price).

He's talking about selling it out from under us now; probably just to try to get leverage to raise our rent now that he regrets our contract. I know that technically any new buyer has to honor our legal contract lease agreement. But I also know that in practice these things are full of holes and anyone who knows how to hire a lawyer can get you thrown out in short order. This is Marin, not SF, so no fancy renter protections up here.

An apartment complex would seriously suck for us; like MA too many people and too many generations. They don't make that many 4BR units in complexes anyway.

Damned housing bubble. Now it's making me compete just to bubblesit. (And people were arguing with me that prices wouldn't be sticky. LOL.)

My LL "attempts" to raise rent, I tell him to fuck himself, chainsaw the house, buy motorhome, sell all the useless shit and surf more.

When someone is fucking you in the ass usually it's because you bent over in the first place.

Strike "My"
Insert "If"

Whoops correct the first way

LLILL, nope not my cat, the cat in the photo is Mukluk, lives in Morro Bay, Georgie lives in $anta Barbara

They don’t make that many 4BR units in complexes anyway.

If I were you I would try to rent two adjacent 2/2 units.

Randy, perhaps you may want to buy before price is optimal? You can surely afford a suitable house conservatively.

Cool… is that the one with slide-out keyboard?

nah, need to accessorise -- that might be the KJam, which is thicker... they packed in 4 band GSM, GPRS, Edge, 802.11b/g, Bluetooth and IR, tho... i'll see how it goes, just wanted 1 comms device instead of juggling 2... straight to the accessories ordering website...

Randy,

have you considered renting TWO close-by condos instead of ONE house? One one-bedder for your mom plus a 2-bedder for your own family. The combined rent probably wouldn't make a big difference, and you can get some privacy from mom too.

SFHs are in much shorter supply than condos, so I'd expect condo rent to stay flat. Condo is a good compromise between SFH and apartment, and seriously apartment would suck for a family.

Dunno about the condo supply up in Marin, but in South Bay you can get plenty of new condo supply, particularly investor stock that is just newly completed. If I were in your situation, I probably would just call the LL bluff, since your worst case scenario is getting kicked out, so why not shoot for anything above that?

Lets get the terms correct, we do all speak English, right?

Ok, own, means you hold the title, "I own my car, here is my title"

To buy means you own.

To "buy" a house means you have a loan from someone which means you do not own fuck all.

No one that posts here is a baller, no one is wealthy, (if unsure of what wealth means google "chris rock, wealth").

200K means fuck all, the issue with all this housing bullshit is that it has produced an environment that is filled with maggot asshats that are pushy, rude and just plain assholes because they "feel" rich because they have a Hummer or a 60" TV.

Fuck off.

Randy, have you considered a scorched earth policy where by you take a fucking chain-saw to the interior walls of the house, pour concrete down all drains or toilets and pour female dog piss on all lawns.

Surely it's worth the 2 or 3k deposit that you will have to fight to get back anyhow.

Fuck them. Remember the first part of anal sex involves bending over.

Shit, I'm sorry, RENTS ARE GOING UP, BUY NOW.

Fuck that, who's up for a blog party?

Fuck it, I'm done.

have you considered a scorched earth policy

Actually yes. Maybe not including chainsaws and pick axes. But similarly to LiLLL our LL has been seriously cheating on his taxes vis-a-vis this property for many years.

If pushed too far, I'll "exercise that option".

We looked into 2BR/2BR in a few apartment complexes. Really nothing fits that bill in S. Marin. We're trying to stay south of the wall of traffic so our options are very limited in the apt complex category. I haven't looked too seriously at creative condo solutions. Perhaps even 2 condos in the same little complex, even if not adjacent, would be fine. Mom could survive across the way. I am skeptical that renting 2 condos will be cheaper than 1 SFH, however; unless maybe they're both rented from the same owner. Otherwise we're talking 2 deposits, etc. etc.

As to buying before it's "optimal": I continue to argue that buying a home is NOT a purely quantitative financial engineering exercise. It's not like the class you took in micro econ 101 where the two little lines intersect at the optimal price.

Rather your own personal family's "optimal" solution is based largely upon what kind of utility you will get out of owning a home. All the financial calculations are really just the constraining factors. So long as you can afford to buy within reason, then whether you should buy is entirely based upon whether you think your life will be better off with the house than without it, being careful to consider ALL factors, including financial ones.

I suspect many bubblesitters in situations similar to mine will find their own "optimality" well before (in terms of time) the absolute bottom of the market. For me at least, at a certain point the financial factors will have become "cheap enough" so that each additional day of waiting is more painful than the value of each additional dollar of price decrease. No one likes to leave money on the table, but sometimes trying to get that last dollar off the table is much more trouble than its worth.

Although for some, they have jumped in too early - we have some friends that got kicked out of two rental properties, one after the other in teh space of six months where the LL decided to sell the houses. So they went off and bought a house last year - I did mention "the housing market is in a bubble at the minute......"

They just had to buy, buy, buy.........I wonder how their market is holding up - Pleasanton (spelling may be wrong)

Good points Randy H

Speaking only for myself and the husband, it is definately a question when we can afford it, not when its at rock-bottom.

Fortunately, we're locked into a rental lease until Jan 2007, so despite the Other Half getting itchy feet, there's nothing to be done until other than just tracking houses we like on the Interweb.