House hunting still

Not much time before I head back to work (this coming Wednesday). We have crammed in a lot of stuff in the past months. Two week long visits to Long Beach. Two visits from Gran and Grandad (McLaughlin). Lots of house hunting.

On that front, we put in an offer on a short sale for a house on Santa Ray. That was rejected by the bank when the BPO came back at $750,000. The agent asked for counter-offers. We declined and moved on. We have seen some nice houses since then in our price range, but the schools. . . it's always the schools, isn't it? We saw a house in Montclair I absolutely hated. It had a very bad vibe, but a good school. We saw a house in Alameda that hadn't been updated since the 60s. I think that the original owner died there. Good school. Awesome Queen Anne, updated with lots of charm, sucky school. Do I want to buy a school or a house?

We keep running in to short sales. They take a long time since the banks scrutinize so much. I thought that these things were approved by the bank for a certain amount anyway, but it doesn't seem to work that way. I think a lot of time the bank and owner are just feeling the waters so to speak. The bank doesn't seem to care if the property goes to foreclosure or not. I feel like there are a lot of people screwing around.

We are debating about putting an offer on another short sale on Barrow in Crocker Highlands. The street looks really great. Our realtor says there are lots of kids. It is close to Bates and Holman. Still relatively close to where we live now. We saw it when it was originally listed at $599,999, but it has since dropped to $549,000. We were considering just throwing in an offer of $500,000.

But then we got a stack of reports about 1" thick. I am not kidding. It includes a pest and structural report, an engineering structural report, a list of natural hazards and property tax information. I am not sure what to make of half of it. The house is on a seismic activity area at risk of landslides and liquification. Part of me thinks, well, this is the bay area, at least it isn't on a fault, right?

The second bathroom has around $10,000 worth of damage. Not a surprise, we saw the bathroom and even I could tell there were major problems. The real kicker though is $50,000 in foundation work and some additional seismic activity work. That's a lot of money. While I might forgo the seismic work for now, I don't know about the foundation. It's settling on the left side of the house. And it's not just the money. We have two little kids. At least Wyatt is at day care during the day and Seth isn't mobile yet. I am kind of convincing myself now might be the best time to do something like this until the boys are teenagers.

We are in a very weird position in that we got A LOT of information about the house most people don't get before hand. There is also a list of disclosures by the property owner. The roof was done in 1986 and supposedly had no issues during the last winter season.

I just don't know enough about houses to know how common some of this stuff is. Maybe foundation work is very common in that neighborhood considering the age of the houses. I guess I won't really know until we do our own inspections.

The only thing we have going in our favor right now is there has been a lot of media attention regarding housing and even an article on the front cover of time about how maybe buying a home isn't such a good investment.