House hunting and selling in Houston

Depending on country, era and target...hunting style is always unique. That applies also to house hunting.

The Finnish style of reading the Sunday newspaper and checking which of the houses are having open house or browsing the main national pages for available rentals or property for sale and then going either for open house or agreeing a showing time with realtor (who represents the seller). The buyer would never have separately a realtor and the buyer has to do whole lot of the work by themselves.
Often it means that someone, who the buyer knows and who has more experience in buying a house e.g. father, brother or brothers best friend, will come and check the place before the final decision.
If you get lucky the seller is so advanced that they have ordered already the objective house inspection and have the report to show when one is viewing the place. This is though a luxury and happens once every blue moon.

After I returned to Finland in 2007, after 12 years abroad...I was dying to get my OWN place. I was on final assignment in Asia-Pacific, 3 months non-stop. I had sent though all my belongings already to Finland from Belgium to wait for my arrival. Parallel I had browsed the internet page with all the properties for sale and had daily notification activated for the houses I considered as suitable candidates. After arrival I went to see 2 houses and bought the latter one. I moved in 1.5 weeks after I arrived back to Finland...chop chop chop.

How is the whole house hunt in US then? Below some notes from my experiences in 2014, when we were momentarily looking for a house:
Well, first of all, you normally find a hunting buddy i.e. real estate agent to present yourself and help you to find & see the places you consider as possible candidates. Apparently only foreigners go see the places without their own realtor and that gets the local realtor professionals always wonder "why would anyone do that?"
Houston has a great real estate page HAR.com, where all properties for sale and rentals are listed.

I must say, I do like the US way - having your own realtor, especially as foreigner, has been a great help.
First one meets to discuss what are the things we would be after. Where we noticed with my husband that what he wants and what I want....well, we were still in different worlds back then, apart from few foundational things.
Hubby - city living, space, modern & simple style
Me - garden, space, modern & simple style, close to park or outdoor opportunities
--> Comment of the current status: Our preferences are slowly getting more common ground after some grinding time together and with the change of becoming 3 in the near future :)

We drove few weekends on our own to check the open houses in the city. Pretty fast we realized that our need for big rooms, modern style and space vs city living....beaucoup bucks.

Slowly my husband gave in, little by little, towards the idea of living in the suburbs.
Once we had bit more idea of what we want we prepared a list to to the realtor. Based on that he suggested bunch of places to see. We pre-checked the list and took out the ones, which we immediately "No Way".
That sounds all nice and easy, doesn't it? If it only was so easy.
The photos and how the representation is done here...that is vicious. The first few times we went to check the houses. Based on the photos and adds I had already the pre-hype: "house XYZ will be our new home! It looked perfect for us!"

Only to find out on-site that e.g. rooms were way smaller than what was the feeling from the photos. Also most of the time they, intentionally, do not attach the picture of the floor plan. So, the only way to get grasp of that...is to go and see the place.
There have been cases were we all thought that we found the dream place, walked in to find that there was water damage, which clearly had brewing time on the floor / ceiling.

In Finland, one has to do more work by oneself but the pictures are closer to reality, plus there is nearly always the floor plan in the internet with the square meters (square footage) for each room. Here you only see photos but will not have the information of the layout or the size of the rooms.

Which sometimes leads to what was my biggest burden: the emotional ups and downs and to remind oneself that you cannot trust anything you see in the internet. Here apparently too many realtors ensure that photoshopping and mega wide lens photos are taken to make the place look better.

Which is why at some point I needed a break from it. I could not deal traveling whole week for work, come back Thursday late evening. Friday work and get the household in shape, during weekend go for house hunting ...ending up emotionally totally deflated and Monday at 5 am head to the airport again.

After several weeks of break we went again one weekend. I got such headache during the house hunt, not sure if it was from hope vs preparing myself for disappointment. So it happened that the last house, which my husband had forgotten to send in the prep list to my e-mail. Means, I had no expectations, had not seen any photos or details of the house.
We walked in....and yes, it needs work but it was the first house, where me and my husband could agree on. We both had positive thoughts about seeing us living there. But he house was wayyyyy overpriced and at the end our level vs the level, what the owners expected to get were too far apart.

After that experience I was just not into it...spending the weekend while driving around looking for places with a realtor, who was scolding us each time that we had not even limited our area to a specific one. That was not what I wanted after long work week. I mean, how could we we limit if we first wanted to get the feel of what all is out there? There is the great Finnish saying: Do not buy pig in a sack. Means that one should be aware of what one gets before agreeing to buy anything. In this case to get to that state, it will not happen over night.

Especially when here you are not just buying a house. You a buying the neighborhood. That means that you need to check the neighborhood and their reputation. You need to check the schools in the area and their scoring, etc. etc. You should check the "coms" aka comparison data for the past 6 months to see if the current sales value is in line. But you need to see at the same how the market has changed, whether prices have gone up, stayed the same or gone down. All of that will impact to how bank will value the property and how that property's value may develop in the future. There is lot of investigation work that goes into understanding the ins-and-the-outs of the potential candidate house before making a decision or making an offer.

So, we decided to shift the focus first on selling our place and then see what comes. We agreed that even renting a place in between would be an option. Would help us to get more ideas of the different areas. Before that came holiday season and we took a break from everything :)

How do you sell your apartment/house in Houston?
For selling the place, which we finally decided to get rolling during first quarter of 2015 we hired a realtor, who is THE expert for downtown real estate. After meeting him my husband and myself really felt good about the coming co-operation. And we were so right!
Terry Stanfield is THE guy to contact if you are planning to sell or buy in downtown Houston.

He got our place photographed and I was pleasantly surprised that his team took photos, which truly represented our place and were very realistic. The photos did not make the rooms look bigger or more pretty. We kept our own furniture for the showings. There is an option here that you can stage your place. Which means that realtor helps to rent furniture to the place to help to create better vision for the buyers. Our combined furniture was modern and so was our place, so it was a good match. We just decluttered the place a little...and otherwise it was ready to sell.

We decided to allow automatically showings on any weekday during our office hours. There is a centralized realtor booking service, where realtors can book showings. With our automatic allowance it means that as long as the showing fell within the category we had set, we would get only text message sharing that there will be showing (with details of the time). During weekends we would get a call from the centralized booking team to ask if they can book showing for a certain time, before confirming it to the potential buyer's realtor. The other neat thing is that they use key boxes i.e. electronic lock boxes. The selling real estate agent puts the apartment key into that and when the centralized booking team confirms the showing, they send the electronic code to the showing agent (i.e. potential buyer's agent). He/she has usually a remote, which adopts the code and is able to open the lock box. Safe and no hassle with the key.

3 months and 3 offers later, we got it sold exactly to the price we had set as the expectation price. This was mixture of my husband's careful background work in forming realistic understanding of current price level for similar lofts and Terry's, our realtor's, guidance.
Terry and his team did excellent job. One of the team members joined the showing (even if it is not mandatory) when they saw from the booking information that realtor, who has booked the showing, was not from downtown. That way they were able to really give the insights to the building's history and idea about the downtown lifestyle.

Between getting the offer, back & fort price / moving time negotiation, accepting the offer and finally doing the "closing" i.e. handing over the property and in return getting the payment for it...it may weeks easily few weeks or more. As after the offer is accepted final inspection is done. Here inspectors tend to aim to get some money back for the buyers. Means that some of them list even the most irrelevant things and it is depending on the buyer, whether they point that out or not. In our case we had just refreshed the place, changed flooring to both bedrooms and painted the walls. So, very little was pointed out in the previous offer we got. We had fixed those, so for the final offer we got there was nothing standing out from the inspection.
After that the buyer's bank (if they choose to take a loan) will do property evaluation, including the whole building or house / area / apartment / etc. This will dictate how the bank will value the property and what kind of loan offer the bank will make to the buyer.

Also, here the interest rate you get is not the same for everyone. It depends on your credit history. If you have "accrued" good credit history, which results to good score. In that case you get better interest rate than if you have either no previous credit history or low score.
Just in comparison - in Finland interest rate is set by bank and is valid for all. Bank does background check and decides whether they give you the loan or not, but interest rate is the one, which the bank has generally listed at the time.

The sale of our apartment was taken care so smoothly by Terry and his team, that very little was left for us to do, other than moving out in agreed time frame. We live now on west side of Houston in a rental, exploring different area and at some point we will start looking for our house. Next time lot wiser than last time, when we were house hunting and we have a great contact now to ask for reference to find someone, who is a match for us showing some potential houses. I got my faith back, thanks to Terry, that selling / buying a house or an apartment can be a pleasant experience, even in Houston.
Right now, we are just gonna relax and enjoy Houston from different perspective! :)