the times of kryptoniteglows

I looked at a house today that was bought in 2005, the price wasn’t even a “bubble” price, but guy did 100% financing and got $3,000 cash at closing. Anyway, the place is a wreck today and being sold by the bank for $100k less. Comparing the comps, the price he paid in 2005 is about FMV today, give or take maybe $10k-20k (alot of the props are getting $10k at closing).

Well, that would be the case if the place wasn’t so neglected. They aren’t showing the place until Sunday, but I drove by to take a look today and they were pumping out 10inches of water from the basement, ewww… Peered though the windows and I could see some ceiling was missing? I should of asked the guy pumping out the water (they are a clean out company) if I could go inside, but I was to shy, worst he could of said was no… Guess I will have to wait to Sunday to take a look.

Anyhow, the former owner’s name sounded sorta familiar, so I look them up on Facebook, turns out they work at the college I went to for undergrad. I suppose I ran into the guy at one point or another and that is why it sounded sorta of familiar. Do a little Google sleuthing and find out the guy has a bunch of little side business for websites and computer repair, was an “example” alum at his college, had like a 3.8x GPA when he went there.

Long story short, seemed like an all around good guy, don’t know how he let the house get so bad and lose it. I thought the house was kinda ugly from the listing picture, but turns out looking at it in person was not bad. The only thing is that only cash or rehab loans are going to be accepted. I’m short on cash for the whole purchase price and don’t want to take out a rehab loan because they have greater interest.

We’ll get creative after viewing Sunday and actually like the place.

So I’ve been seeing this one property in my searches, over and over with what seemed like a great price. I was rather surprised it had not been sold or something so far, the seller was said to be “motivated”, but I just figured they were not as motivated as listed. The listing is probably 6 months old, the picture of the property still has snow on it…. Some listings don’t have dates, so that is the first bad sign. The lack of pictures or pictures that are obviously out of date.

Google map’s streetview showed the house to be next to a gas station. Given that, I’m not even sure why I bothered to look. The place was also off of RT 4, basically a 4 lane highway is front of the house, these should have all been obvious signs that this place was no good…

I decided to do some background search on it, found they basically hadn’t paid their property taxes since 2006! This kind of intrigued me that it would have to be sold at a sheriff’s sale for taxes or mortgage, so I decided to take a look. Took the short drive over, it was only really then that I noticed the how bad it would be to live in front of a 4 lane roadway. There is sort of a barrier between the row of houses that start the development and the roadway, but it’s mainly a little row of immature trees. The gas station also seems awfully close, in that you could walk over to it.

The “two car” garage was basically one super long garage, in theory you could fit two cars inside it, but would you? Against my better judgment, I get out of my car to look at the property. That’s when the stench hit me! I don’t know if someone died inside or a crazy cat lady lived there or some combination of both, it stunk!

First, let me admit I’m definitely abrasive, so maybe I scared the salespeople off…

My parents just bought a townhouse, likely just to resell it once they fix it up. One of them items the place needs are new windows as the current ones are leaking and/or the seals are broken. My brother gets P.J. Fitzpatrick to come out to the place for a quote. They send out two guys, they make small talk and make measurements of the windows. We are pretty upfront we are mostly concerned with price, but who isn’t in this economy? The guys are pretty upfront about how they aren’t going to be the cheapest because they make their own windows and are of the highest quality.. Then one of the guys, pulls out his laptop to start doing a power point presentation about their company. How 50% of their business come from repeat customers or referrals, which is nice I guess, but I’ve already asked you to come here, so I don’t exactly need all that much convincing. One of the freaking slides was of old Pete Fitzpatrick, like I care. At this point I’m kinda of annoyed because I really don’t care and just want my quote, my dad evens tells the guy he is talking too much. The guy is like I just started! I’m like omg… Seriously, I was

Anyways, working for the company that I do, in the industry I do, I understand why they may not be the cheapest because of the service they offer. However, I contacted them about getting a price and I would like to get that NOW. One of the things I say specifically is that I am interested in getting the price for comparison, even if you are not the cheapest, it maybe worth it to go with you guys if I see what the difference is, however if your price is something like DOUBLE then I likely would not use you. They say nothing to dispute that their company may cost DOUBLE what other companies cost. And apparently they take offense to what I’ve said because they decide to leave without giving me a proposal at all!

Well thanks for nothing P.J. Fitzpatrick! You’ve not only wasted your time, but my time as well. I’m definitely disappointed, especially since I wasn’t given the price after all that wasting of time. For some reason, I also imagine their customers being senior citizens who hire them at over DOUBLE cost because they would like to have someone to talk to, since their salespeople, LOVE to talk, talk , talk.

The salespeople were not even very good or perhaps P.J. Fitzpatrick windows are not very good. The more I was talking to the salesperson, the more I felt like I was getting ripped off, but he was just trying to make me feel good about getting ripped off. I think a lot of the big selling points for companies now is to promote the 30% tax credit you can get for making energy efficient home improvements, which we would have received here because of the likelihood we were going to sell the place soon. Anyway, the moronic salesmen doesn’t even mention that their windows would add resell value to the home, so I must assume they would not because they aren’t exactly “name brand”. I don’t know much about windows, but I know of Anderson and Pella, those seem like name brand windows to me and I would probably pay more for those. I’m slightly bias as I do currently have mostly Anderson windows…

I get to have another company come out tomorrow and do the same thing over again! Maybe I’ll feign interest in living there, so I can actually receive a freaking estimate!

In summary to P.J. Fitzpatrick: I want new windows, I will pay for new windows, you give me estimate and I will compare with other estimates. There is no need for me to see slides with old white men! While price is a concern and I can’t imagine where it wouldn’t be, I certainly would pay more for quality, reliability, and getting the home sold faster. Your salesman showing me old white men, do not help with that at all.

So I was over at my parents today, brother tricked me into going to Ritz Camera store downtime that was closing. Seriously I got tricked, he said we were going to the park!

Anyway, end up with some new lenses and filters stuff for the XSi, including some 6 & 8 point star filters. We go out the back when it is dark to see if we can get that neat effect on the street/city lights. We notice some weird dude pooing or peeing behind the building next to ours. Unfortunately this isn’t that uncommon so we ignore it and play around with the settings on our cameras.

We go inside and not a few minutes later the dude that was urinating or defecating in public is in my parent’s store raising a stink where is his nickel . My dad gives him his damn nickel and he has the nerve to slam the doors, spill what I hope was juice all over the place, and yell in the street incoherently . My dad tells me that he tried to give him the stupid nickel when he paid, but for whatever reason he left. I share my story about seeing the insane guy behind the store. I guess he had to poo/piss so badly he couldn’t wait for his change. However, that is no damn reason for you to be messing up someone’s store. I should took the embarrassing pic of you behind the building with your pants down. Though you can’t really retaliate against them, there are more of them then there of you…

Oh yea, my brother tells me that last week some guy called the cops, yes DIALED 911 because his shrimp fried rice didn’t have peas and carrots . The even sadder thing is that police officers did show up, I hope there wasn’t someone else with a more pressing issue that got delayed because of this guy. My parents had already offered to remake the order if he paid 50 cents to add the peas and carrots. The guy claims he doesn’t have 50 cents and the other store includes peas and carrots. The cops basically “side” with my parents, pay the 50 cents or STFU and order from the other store that includes them in the future. With the cops there, he magically has 50 cents to spend for the peas and carrots, but tells the cops that my parents are going to mess with his food now. Um, fucking wow dude, if you don’t want people messing with your food, you probably should not eat out and probably should not be an ass. I’m pretty sure the cops wanted to spit in the food for wasting them time on such a trivial matter. If money is so tight that you have trouble coming up with 50 cents, you probably should not be eating out either or maybe you should be ordering the plain fried rice instead of SHRIMP.

If my parents were a larger scale store, they probably would have remade it to get the guy out of there. However, they have a small store and stupid people expecting you to fix things for them really does become a problem, they think they are entitled to have things their way. People are so freaking ridiculous, I’ve bought food that basically tasted like crap to me, was vastly inferior to food I’ve had before, or was otherwise wasn’t up to my expectations. I didn’t go crazy and call 911 about it though. I tossed it and learned to not buy/eat that again.

I totally think I should get a different agent, the one I’m using now is the one that my parents used and isn’t exactly all that good…I request specific information and I get back parts of the information or parts of the information with a bunch of random stuffs in it. On the other hand, could be my fault since I haven’t expressly stated what kind of house I’m looking for or want. I could understand him being confused with me inquiring about $250k houses in North Wilmington and also about $25k slum properties in ghetto Wilmington.

So far the only house I have really liked was the first house that I looked at, unfortunately so did 11 others. I don’t blame them, the house just across the street was selling at a list price of $70k more and from what my agent tells me, that has also been sold (it’s pending, so still waiting to see the final sale price). Looking in the same price range now, the properties are mostly condos or townhouses. If it is a detached house, then it is in an undesirable location like ghetto Wilmington, Elsmere, or New Castle. The locations I would prefer are locations close to UD as eventually I do plan on going back and doing the whole masters thing, eventually… Since I already live just 1.5 miles away from UD, it’s hard to really get any closer to UD without paying much more or moving into a less quality house like Madison Dr. Even moving just down the street into the new “luxury” townhouses would run me the high $300s! Ouch…
I’ve sort of have narrowed down my choices though:

Slumlord – Buy a super cheap property in the city, I mean ridiculously cheap at like $20k or less. Mind you I’ve never actually visited one of these properties and sometimes there are warnings that the pipe/water heater and such have been removed (aka stolen), but I would budget a fixing up budget of $5k. Then I would resell or rent the property out, in these economic conditions, it seems the later would be more likely. Even reading this proposal myself, I see a lot of problems. I would exhaust my cash to buy the property because the banks don’t loan money for houses in these conditions, but may still need to borrow in order to complete the repairs necessary to make the place habitable. It might be difficult to finder renters for a place in the ghetto and if I do find renters, they are more likely to be the kind that are not on time, likely to skip out, or be damaging to the property. Even without renters, I would still need to pay for insurance and the property taxes, could be a real money pit…

Townie – Find a place in Newark, close to UD. I’ve found two types, an acceptable place that I would not mind loving for the next 3 years in and the other is similar to the above of buying a fixer upper and renting it out. The properties in Newark of course cost more and it is difficult to get traditional financing on fixer uppers.

American – Buying the largest property the bank will allow me to borrow in North Wilmington/Newark just because it’s the American dream, I won’t be able to afford it later, and other misconceptions about real estate that likely let to the massive foreclosures we have now. I really don’t plan on doing this unless I find the absolute perfect house at an amazing price. The closest I’ve come is scouting out an 2 BR house on an acre of land in North Wilmington that has an approved short sale. However, since my agent is kinda sucky, I’m not sure what “approved” short sale really means in terms of what I can offer. The list price is still much more than I would pay. While the land is valuable, it also means a hell of a lot of maintenance until I utilize it for something like my own custom house which would probably be very far down the line as I would have exhausted my cash and what I could spare monthly to the mortgage I would need to buy the property in the first place. Anyhow, the maintenance on an acre of land would kill me, even with a riding lawn mower… The fertilizer, watering, and etc to keep the lawn looking decent would be an expense too. I barely keep the lawn I have now looking that good. My lawn mower didn’t have oil (engine oil, not gas) last week so I didn’t mow the lawn, now it has been raining continuously for days and won’t stop for more days, the front lawn has weed thingys growing or the grass has sprouted. Yea, I’m so attuned to my lawn that sometimes I have no idea if something is a bad weed or is a good plant.