How many times did you visit a house before making an offer?
janjan212
16 years ago
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talley_sue_nyc
16 years agojanjan212
16 years agoRelated Discussions
How many showings before your first offer.
Comments (30)We sold last fall. We had over 30 showings and had to drop our price over 50K, but it was about $100k less than some realtors told us it would go for originally. We priced it 50k less than they had suggested. But then again the area we lived in was listed by Zillow as the second worst in the country to sell at the time. Most of the buyers coming in were young and local buyers who could not really afford the house we had. It was 3300 square feet with an 800 square foot finished basement on 3/4 acre land. It took 7 months to sell. Had two offers one was cash the other was a contingency with low ball offer that finally came up to what we accepted from our cash payer. If they had offered us that much to start with they probably would have won out and had been under contract even with their contingency before our second buyers came through. Too bad for them....See MoreWhat kind of mistakes did you catch when visiting home being built?
Comments (40)I am amazed at how few errors or disappointments those above have had to deal with. Our build has been fraught with many more than described above. It seemed almost daily we would find something wrong (either completely wrongly built, or just misguided such as the vents in awkward spots). When we were hiring subs (we are DIYing the second half so far fewer errors in this half), we would come home and brace ourselves as we knew something would not be to our liking. We just did not yet know what it was. Some of the bigger, harder to fix errors were: 1)framers did not use a level when they set the roof trusses so all the walls were off centre in our upper level -- we did not find this out until after they had bricked, 2)The masons did not clean up all of the mortar spills when bricking so there are still mortar stains on our bricks 3)Having no HVAC plan with agreed upon locations for duct runs, vents, etc set us back months as we had to go back to get a HVAC design done and start with a different HVAC plan and contractor,4) the foundation was not level in all spots, and some spots did not have a brick ledge where brick was planned. I did read an ebook before building that is all about typical building errors to watch out for (or poor design decisions made by builders). I highly recommend it for those seeking more answers than provided by this thread. Good luck all. Most mistakes can be fixed. Find them as soon as possible. Assume every time you visit that mistakes have been made in your absence and measure and check every single thing. Work out in advance the locations for everything (esp HVAC items) as builders will not usually make good aesthetic choices. Not sure why so many of them think a thermostat should be centered on the largest display wall in your house. Here is the ebook I mentioned that deals with typical errors to watch out for and hence avoid. I found the fee for the book to be well worth the price. Sorry it is not free. I have no association with the author. I just found the book helpful. I imagine the book would be more useful to those at the planning stages, or early build stages. Carol ebook...See MoreHow Many Times Have You Built a New Home (or had someone build it)?
Comments (33)The house we'll build next year will be our last house. I did look to buy instead of build but we really just want what we want--and don't want to compromise as much as we'd have to if we buy and remodel. Completely agree ... we also looked for something existing that we might update a bit, but found that the non-negotiable items on our list just couldn't be found in an existing home. So glad we built. We've been in the house for almost 3 months now and we're really happy with how it turned out and how it works for us. There are always some bumps in the road, but knowing our budget and what our priorities were (plus a really good contractor) helped to make this build a fairly smooth process. Hope things go well for you. It seems the consensus here is previous experience does make a big difference....See MoreCustoms- How many times did you go back and forth with your architect?
Comments (22)As Arialvetica wrote above, I use a charrette approach. For local design all conceptualizing is done in a face to face design session with the client an integral part of the process. It minimizes the '"back and forth," meaning your architect showed you a plan, you proposed changes, he/she modified it, you asked for more changes, the architect chaned it again". I can float an idea and draw it up and get owner reaction right there in lieu of guessing and involving possible "back to the drawing board" stuff. No spectators are allowed because everyone is an active participant. I wrote about the process in a colleagues blog "Life of an Architect" here http://www.lifeofanarchitect.com/design-in-a-day/ and put another on this site a while back here...please scroll down to my photo heavy 5/12/16 post http://ths.gardenweb.com/discussions/3887104/what-should-i-expect-from-my-architect-long?n=22 This one was like 3 sessions over the course of around 4 weeks....See Morerowen_realtor
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