"We’ve been looking for a house for 3 years and finally found one and bought it, even though some people’s common sense said “now is the time to wait.”

ängstlich at robchipman.net 15 Mar 2010 8:28 am -

“We’ve been looking for a house for 3 years and finally found one and bought it, even though some people’s common sense said “now is the time to wait.” We waited through the mini-’crash’ and didn’t see a single house we wanted to buy. We had very particular wants and the kind of house we wanted just doesn’t show up often. So we bought the one we found, figuring the odds were slim that we would ever see such a thing again before our children went to university. Even when the market was down, the selection completely stunk, at least in terms of what we wanted – old, not reno’d into submission and turned into a replica of every other vancouver reno that looks like a bad preppy furniture catalogue, close to transit, etc.
But we weren’t willing to spend just anything; we refused to get in a bidding war; we refused to pay more than we thought was currently “reasonable”; etc. and the market situation made it possible to do that. We got a price reduction on the house and have a house that was within the range of what we could afford.
My only regret is that we didn’t buy a house 3 years ago that we didn’t want; we could have sold it now at a profit instead of having thrown many 10s of grand away in rent. But at the time we thought: we’ll find a place we like in a few months so all the expense of purchase and resale will not be worth it. We were wrong, but might not have been.”