I’m slightly obsessed with the HGTV show House Hunters in which prospective buyers visit three (they obviously visit more but you only see three) properties with a real estate agent and then try to buy one of them. Sounds scintillating, right? Well, yeah, okay. It’s is sort of boring unless you’ve become house hunting obsessed (as I have).
All this is to say that we are in the preliminary stage of looking at new houses and thinking about selling ours. Last night, we went to see a house that I’d found just listed last weekend. It was, we figured, too small for us but it was quite cool in appearance and the location is a place we would love to be. So we went and were disappointed to find it smaller, dingy, more ramshackle than we had imagined. So two thumbs firmly down on that house. We will keep looking.
On the other side of the house buying coin, we have selling. Discussions at present are about whether or not we should try to sell the house ourselves and cut out that ugly 6% commission. We know someone who recently sold her house in a weekend–the weekend she listed it. Okay, so that’s the kind of fantasy we all hope to come true but what is the reality for us? I’m thinking it’s possibly a situation of biting off more than we can chew but I’m also thinking it might be a lot of funny (and cost effective).
Of course, with classic bad timing we are thinking about doing all of this just as Alan Greenspan is hinting at a bubble:
Some regions of the U.S. housing market show signs of unsustainable price speculation and “froth” from rapid sales, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said. The surge may ease as homes become less affordable, he said.
“It’s pretty clear that it’s an unsustainable underlying pattern,” Greenspan said in response to a question after a speech on energy to the Economic Club of New York. “People are reaching to be able to pay the prices to be able to move into a home.”
“There are a few things that suggest, at a minimum, there’s a little froth in this market,” Greenspan said. While “we don’t perceive that there is a national bubble,” he said that “it’s hard not to see that there are a lot of local bubbles.”
myfanwy collins 