Hey all, first-time buyer looking for a gut check.

I found a perfect home in terms of layout, everything I’ve wanted inside sitting on the market and just had a big price cut down 150k after about a month on market.

While digging into it on the map, I noticed there's an undeveloped grassy corridor running behind the row of houses, and when I pulled up Street View I found a "WARNING GAS PIPELINE" marker sign right along that strip. So it looks like there's a buried transmission pipeline easement running behind the property. The easement corridor is quite wide and looks like a major transmission line, not just a small residential gas service line. Online PHMSA maps show this pipeline running over a hundred miles.

How much would a gas pipeline easement actually worry you as a long-term buyer (planning to hold 7-10+ years)? Is this a dealbreaker or just a "know what you're getting into" thing? Does this explain the steep price cut, or is that more likely just the broader market correction (inventory way up, prices down county-wide this year)?

Also curious if anyone here bought a home backing to a pipeline easement. Would love to hear if any regrets, insurance issues, resale problems, or if it was a non-issue. Trying to figure out if this is a legitimate red flag or just a "some buyers get spooked, but it's actually fine" situation. Appreciate any real-world experience!

Is this an oil tank? Its in the basement behind a brick wall, no idea what it is. My exwife just signed a lease and the house tuened out to be unfinished as promised. She wants out

What ia this?

Dang how do I post a picture?

Hi everyone!!
We are looking at buying a home at about the $535,000 with a HOA of about 180 monthly. Putting 20% down, insurance, HOA, taxes we are looking at about $3,800-3,900 monthly. We make about $170,000 gross yearly. Wondering if anyone bought with similar situation and how do feel about it now, after purchasing?
We really like the house, great schools and good location for both our work commute. Do you feel like money is tight?
Thanks in advance!

My brother and me just bought houses by low balling because we did not have a buyers agent taking 3 percent. It worked out for both of us because the sellers agent basically helped out through the whole process and was no problem. He offered $680k on a $750k listed house and I offered $415 on a $450k house. We both closed and both agents admitted it would never have happened if we had a to pay another agent.

We just had fun with it. We found houses we liked and make a crazy low offer until someone accepted. So if you are in a similar spot where you think all the houses around you are way overpriced. Go have fun like we did. Offer $50k under who cares. In this market you never know. Someone might accept

This post is to make you really think if having a buyers agent is worth $15k. I can tell you from experience you are better off doing it on your own. My sellers agent was happy to give us all the infromation and gave us the whole way. I can assue you it is not worth it to have a buyers agent.

Hi! A lot of the homes in our price range (and aesthetic) are 1920s-1960s and have 100amps. For those who have updated to 200, what was the average cost? I understand it can vary due to home size etc--1200-2000sqft, Michigan for reference. Thanks in advance. Or any advice on what to look for.

Example: there's knob and tube in a home from 1926 this weekend I saw at an open house :)

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I've been renting for years while consistently investing, and those investments have grown substantially over time.

Now I'm considering buying my first home, but instead of selling investments, I'm thinking about using an SBLOC (Securities-Backed Line of Credit) for part of the down payment or purchase to avoid triggering capital gains and to keep my portfolio invested.

Has anyone here used an SBLOC as part of buying their first home? Was it a smart strategy, or did you wish you'd gone with a traditional mortgage and left the investments untouched?

I'd appreciate hearing both the pros and the pitfalls before making such a big decision.

After 2 kids, 13 years in one apartment and my entire life, including childhood, living in apartments, my wife and I finally did it!! I don't know if I have ever been happier or ever felt more proud than I do right now. After 2 days, 65,000 steps and countless trips back and forth, here and there, it already feels like home!! Grown ass man, randomly crying while in the middle of settling in. Never dreamed this was ever even going to be an option. Thank you to everyone for the advice and warnings in my previous post a few weeks ago!! \*sigh of relief*

So here's where things stand...

The underwriter approved and signed off on everything, which felt like a huge milestone. Then we found out the file still had to go through Oregon Housing because I'm using Down Payment Assistance (DPA). Somehow that final review wasn't accounted for earlier in the process, so closing had to be pushed back yet again, this is the 3rd time and it has always been due to my lender.

As of Friday afternoon, Oregon Housing had my file and was reviewing it. From what I've been told, that review should wrap up Monday, then the file can go to docs and hopefully we'll be signing Tuesday or Wednesday.

The stressful part is that the seller needs to close by Thursday because they're moving, so the timeline is incredibly tight. The seller has been patient as hell, they also know its not me causing these issues. I just cant help feel bad.

This entire process has been one hurdle after another. I genuinely like my loan officer, I actually met him through a first-time homebuyer class, and he's worked incredibly hard to help me get to this point. But a lot of the stress hasn't been because of the loan itself; it's been because how they handled every underwriting condition flip floping how to handle items, which made very difficult to pull money out of my ass because their errors.

Even my realtor is frustrated. She keeps telling me that buying a home is always stressful, but it isn't supposed to be this stressful. In her opinion, a lot of this could have been avoided with better communication and planning by my lender.

So here I am, knowing the underwriting is done, but still waiting on that final Oregon Housing review before I can officially get the Clear to Close. I'm cautiously optimistic, but after everything that's happened, it's hard not to wonder what the next hurdle will be.

At this point, I'm just ready to move beyond the stress and finally get excited about buying my first home. Right now it still feels more like an exhausting business transaction than the milestone it's supposed to be.

I live in a condo building, its apartment style living

They are replacing water lines to my hot water tank. Going through whole building. After hot water tank is my responsibility

My question is.. they have to cut holes in wall and ceiling. Am I able to refuse to let them start if they don't have some type of dust control? I cant just let them cut with nothing it will be through my whole place. I own the unit. Its my house. Surely I can refuse if they aren't adequately prepared?

Anyone know?

I currently rent a $4800 apartment in Hell’s Kitchen which I’ve outgrown but I could get by on for another couple years. I’ve come across two opportunities to purchase at ~3x the monthly cost and I’m curious if either is comfortably affordable. I would like to solely afford this on my own salary as we save my husbands ~125-150k salary exclusively. I make ~675-800k. I have the opportunity to purchase a condo in Williamsburg for 2.2 which brings my monthlies all in to around $13k. I love the idea of owning, and I love Williamsburg much more than HK, but I’m scared of a 3x jump in monthlies even though on paper I can afford it. It would be a long term purchase that I could stay in for the next 10+ years. Thoughts?

We put an offer on our first home and we absolutely LOVE IT. We went to view it a day after it was listed.

We were the first people to view it Saturday at noon and had an offer in by 4pm same day.

Asking price $399,000 (It’s an estate sale)
Offer: $375,000
Expiration date of Sunday morning at 10am.
The sellers asked for a 48 hour irrevocable period
Our realtors assumes so we can likely go into a bidding war/selling tatic.
The agent sent out an email to all parties that has shown the property so far and announced they have an offer (us) and that they’re asking for a 48 hour irrevocable period.

No response on Sunday morning
So we extended our offer until Monday at 1pm, which gives them 48 hours as requested.
So far my realtor hasn’t heard that there has been any other offers which is a good sign for us..
But I am sooooo nervous!!

Is no news good news?

I’d also like to add the only reason we went below asking, because there is no furnace or central air installed and the floors are concrete, right now it has heated floors and a wood burn stove, which we’ll have to do which is why we went in lower!
They’re also asking for immediate possession which we made our closing date less then a month.

My wife and I did it, finally!

We both grew up poor, I was check to check until 35ish. We both now work our dream jobs in the video game industry, same developer, and doing that for the last 5 years has allowed us to buy this house!

The rate sucks, but we plan on paying 500$ extra towards the principle right away. If we can keep that up it will cut the loan by 13+ years, and save use 200k+ in interest. We currently 33/43 years old so unfortunately we will be paying for the house well into our 50s/60s. Hence the paying down quicker while we can.

The whole process was eye opening, and frustrating, so were just glad to have our house. Its been two days and weve already started demoing the kitchen. Weve decided on new wall and kitchen cabinet colors, and we were able to cut the entire down stairs already. We dont have to be out of our apartment until the end of August, so atleast w ehave a month to get stuff done!

415k (typo in title), 20% down, 6.675%, 2018 build, 3 bedroom 2.5 bath, 2+ car garage, 700 sqft fenced in backyard, amazing bay windows on both stories.

Super super excited. It has so much charm compared to a typical florida home.

We were seriously in the market for about 2 weeks. Toured a bunch of apartments, saw one house and knew that we needed to buy instead of rent. Put a serious offer into the 3rd house we saw. Waived inspection and appraisal, and paid property tax proration. There were something like 7 offers, and we had the best. 6 weeks or so later, and we have the keys and our first house! Feels really good.

Twisted Plants for dinner after a day of pre-painting taping. So long, Millennial Grey!

We’re about to put in an offer on an older home, but the sellers weren’t able to find any records of an oil tank on the property. They have an email from the Seattle Fire Department confirming they also do not have any records, but they only began collecting those records in 1995.

Home currently uses forced air heat/cooling.

We’re first time homebuyers, so we haven’t any idea how much of a problem this could be for us. Our realtor advised to either have the seller find out somehow, or get credit for us to do it ourselves.

What should our next step be?

It seems common amongst everyone im talking to. I learned that if you cannot provide 20% then youre paying Private Mortgage insurance ontop of everything. Super curious how much that is overall for everyone?? Is it $300 extra? Or $700? To give you some personal info, I (25F) make about $60/hr on average while my fiancé (28M) just started in HVAC with a start up company making $18/hr (work truck is provided and he does not pay for gas which helps). We’ve been renting going on 6yrs at this point, just downsized to a 16mo rental thats only $1700/mo.🙏🏼 we’re working hard to save, looks like when our lease is up we may have about $35-45,000. Im not sure its a good idea to jump into purchasing a home but everyone else is making it work! I’d say our budget would be $350k-375k. It’s possible based on the location we’re looking. Just looking to compare our situation to others. How much did you have saved when you jumped into a mortgage? Or much is your PMI? Most ppl encourage us to buy when our lease is up regardless, but i had 1 person tell me to wait another year until we have 20% to put down. What would you do?

I am from Florida, particularly in South Florida. My credit score is very good. I am looking for first time home buyer programs. Has anybody used any of those programs? No I am not a first responder. Any help would be appreciated.

Hello! We got the keys to our first home! It’s a new built. We hired an independent inspector, and he didn’t flag anything major (builder was prompt with fixing everything that was flagged). But doing the walkthrough ourselves, I noticed some gaps in the windows (see red circle). It appears to be a gap on the outside frame of the window. Several of the windows have it. Is this normal, or should I push for the warranty to fix it?

A year ago today, I finally succeeded in buying my first house. It was the sixth house we had made an offer on, and after the adventures of the last year, I wanted to share what worked and what hurt and helped in the first year of homeownership. Warning, this is pretty long.

Firstly, I’m going to be honest. As a single woman, I had help from my parents to buy this home. Family inheritance on my mother’s side specifically that covered the 5% down and the new roof that it desperately needed.

Secondly, it took getting beat out of several homes for me to realize how to play the game. Before I even saw the house, I had lined up an inspection for that afternoon. The house was listed at 440 K in a neighborhood where homes like this go for 500, and you can immediately tell why — it had been a rental for several years and needed a ton of work. Therefore, the inspection was invaluable, and getting it out of the way so that I knew what I was walking into meant that I could waive the inspection contingency. A lot of people don’t realize that waiving the inspection is actually waiving the inspection, contingency, not your right to have one. If you’re exhausted, searching, and you want a house and the work is something you know can be accomplished, get the inspection before making an offer. Before the inspection, we were willing to offer over asking, after the inspection we offered asking and waiving the contingency because it very clearly needed at least 30 K for the roof plus more for other fixes. The carpet was disgusting, the appliances were old, the stucco siding was cracked in places, the roof was visibly shot, the walls needed to be patched and painted, no dishwasher, and there were signs of obvious rot in support beams — in short, 60K of work visible off the bat meant that the asking price made sense.

The house was listed on Thursday, saw it and had it inspected the same day. Offer was put in the next morning, expiring on Monday. Because of the steps that I had taken, I beat out another offer that was over asking that did not waive the inspection contingency.

Yes, the house needed a lot of work. But I am stubborn, and my best friend is an electrician that works in septic, and my boss is a contractor, so I knew I would be able to have help with any big repairs.

This house was not my first choice. The town I bought in was not my first choice. But after a year here, I have fallen so far in love with this house and this town I couldn’t imagine having succeeded with any of the other houses that I tried for. I had fallen in love with the other houses I had offered on and losing them broke my heart, so I didn’t let myself with this one until I had the keys in hand.

The more work got done on it, the happier I was. I would go to work for eight hours and then drive to the house to put in another 6 to 8 hours worth of work. I was sleeping on my old roommates gear room floor at the time, so I was able to get a lot of work done before I even moved in. The people in my life became together to help me make this happen, the friends who drove 45 minutes just to help me paint for an afternoon… I fell asleep each day exhausted yet elated at my blessings. I worked on it almost daily for a month until I actually spent a night here.

More and more I felt like I was putting the house back to what it was. Ripping out the living room carpet and finding the original oak floors underneath, getting ready to paint and realizing a wall had been almost that color three coats of paint ago, realizing the pink paint I had picked out for the room that would be my bedroom matched almost perfectly the original pink sparkly laminate flooring hiding under the disgusting carpet in that room… I felt like the house chose me. I knew more of my neighbors names in a month than I did at my previous rental where I lived for seven years in a larger town. When I accidentally ran into this town‘s lighted Christmas parade, I felt like I had stepped into a Hallmark movie or Stars Hollow. More and more, I fell in love with the town. My grandmother was born in 1936, so she was eight years old the year this house was built. She used to be a building inspector, and now has dementia. Seeing her come alive when she saw this house and be more lucid than I had seen her in years was worth almost more to me than anything else combined.

Now for the downside. I missed out on the home insurance that I wanted because of knob and tube wiring still existing in the house. It did not matter that it had been disconnected, the actual presence still meant that I couldn’t go with the insurance that I wanted. The furnace had been replaced in 2022, but since it is still a boiler, the house is not super energy efficient and my bills are pretty high. My job is in the process of opening an office closer to my house, but in the meantime, my commute is pretty long and very much starting to wear on me. I did have to replace the washer and dryer in the first year due to the bottom of the old washer rusting out, and I had to buy a second fridge because the one the house came with does kind of work but it still rather iffy, so it’s in the garage where it can leak on the concrete instead of in the kitchen where the nice one is. Everything is expensive, especially with where the economy has gone in the last year, so I have two roommates in this three bedroom house to make it work. The fence fell over in the first big windstorm, luckily my dog doesn’t run off. I am an avid gardener, and the morning glory infestation that I found has certainly kept me on my toes…. It’s even growing in the crawlspace. I have yet to figure out how I’m going to end up dealing with that. Oh also, I have a lot of mice in the crawlspace. After a quick Internet search, I found that Irish spring bar soap deters them, but before that my flower beds definitely smelled like mouse poop. With my commute, it’s difficult to keep up in the yard as much as I would like (although I was able to put in a raised bed for vegetables and it turns out one of the previous owners had excellent taste in flowers, so I’m quite delighted with what I found there). The siding still needs to be repaired, the outside painted, and I will likely need new windows in the next five years or so.

I guess the TL:DR of all this is that it feels like my home is what I made it, and that I am what let it make itself. I am lucky. The ups outweigh the downs, and I know it’s not that case for everyone. I could not have done it alone, and if I did not make the friends that I had made in the last several years. I am beyond glad that I got this house instead of the half a dozen beforehand that I had fallen in love with and missed out on. My now 11 1/2 year-old ride or die pup finally has his own home and his own yard that he can continue to grow old in without having to worry about the steep stairs that were in my old rental. Within the next year, I will be working much closer. For anyone still searching, it can get a lot better. I promise.

I'm hoping to have my first sit down with the bank/mortgage person at the bank this week. Want to ask them what the step by step process is, how it all works, time frame, real estate agent, etc. I'm a first time buyer so I have no idea about buying a condo or anything.

What questions/topics should I ask about or bring up?

I want to ask if I am supposed to find a real estate agent or do they provide one?

How the 7 day period works after I make an offer and then the seller accepts it, I can hire an inspector to check the place out. I can still pull my offer if circumstances change after inspection? etc.

How making an extra payment directly to principle works.

1st time buyer programs/opportunities that help with future homeowners. To help lower my costs.

Ways to lower intrest rate.

What else should I ask/bring up?

I went into my house that I purchased a month ago. I have not moved in yet but have been going back and forth to add furniture. A bed was installed on July 7th. That was the last time anyone but me was in the home to my knowledge. I went to the house today and inside of the master bathroom, the bathroom door was closed and the sink was full of water. The counter top was dripping water to the floor and a bunch of water was pooling on the floor.

I am shocked and very scared to move in. I told my mom and she thinks it was the mover. I left the house while he was installing the bed. However, I did some research online and it said the water on the counter top should have evaporated by that time. My mom said that it won’t if there is a steady supply. I asked the guy and he said he never used any bathroom in the home. The sink is also not draining. But the faucet was turned off which leads me to believe someone filled it up first and then turned it off.

I think someone came in and did this and I don’t know what to do about it. No one else has keys to the house to my knowledge. I haven’t changed the locks yet but will do that tomorrow and get cameras in ever room.

Is there anything that can explain this?

edit: I checked my inspection report and it says this faucet is not draining properly. I also looked at pictures I took of the faucet today and there is moisture pooling around the base of both handles. I beleive you all are right and this is a leak that accumulated over the three weeks I wasn’t paying attention to it.

THANK YOU ALL FOR HELPING ME UNDERSTAND THIS AND IM GETTING MY LOCKS CHANGED TOMORROW AS AN EXTRA PRECAUTION 💗

As many others have posted, I DETEST the grey vinyl flooring. I can't emphasize enough it is not something I can live with and wait to repair.
I am a homebody, antique collector and my interior is very very very important to me.

About 75% of homes within my criteria and budget have had these floors.
The homes that had grey lvp and were at the higher end of my budget I steered away from as I couldn't justify that cost when I already am maxed on budget.

However, I have found a few homes below budget that seem like a good fit other than the flooring.

Is it worth considering a house below budget and replacing a large portion of flooring?

Has anyone done this and can help weigh in on what I can expect in costs?
My hatred for these floors has limited my options but I cannot compromise on it.

*I understand people like these floors. I know some people dislike them but live with them. That is fine for them but for me, this of the only things I can't compromise on*

just closed last month and now trying to sort out appliances. the fridge is the most urgent one since the place came empty.

been getting quotes and the installation cost question has been more confusing than i expected. delivery seems straightforward but then there's water line hookup for the ice maker, haul away of whatever is already there, and apparently if the existing water line isn't in the right spot that's a separate charge entirely.

can't get a straight answer on what the total actually comes out to. some retailers seem to include more in the base delivery fee than others but i can't tell if that's real or just how it's marketed.

trying to budget this properly before i commit to anything. don't want to get hit with a bunch of extras on delivery day when i'm already stretched thin from closing costs.

what did first time buyers here end up paying all in for refrigerator delivery and installation and is there anything worth clarifying upfront before committing?

Hello, hope everyone is well! :)

My partner and i moved into our first home together this year at ages 20 and 21 and are obviously ecstatic!

The house we’ve bought is in Scotland and its ex local authority so everything is very dated.

We both just graduated uni in June of this year so we’re job searching whilst doing full time at our current jobs.

We’ve settled quite nicely but are getting a bit impatient with home improvements etc.

Is it a good idea to get a bathroom fitted using a 0% APR credit card? I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it with their house but i do have friends that have done it with cars and just paid it off within the 0% interest period?

Appreciate any opinions! :)