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I think whether or not you should wait depends mostly on your individual circumstance and personality. There are several practical questions you should ask yourself: Will this be your first house? Do you have a house to sell? How much cash do you have?
If you re like my husband and me and you ve assessed your circumstances and remain determined to buy, the real question is not if, but how
? As someone who made five unsuccessful offers before finally getting a house, here is my hard-won list of dos and don ts for successfully navigating this wild real estate market.
Do: Find a realtor you trust to fight for you
After our first rejected offer, we pressed on but we still held onto our house
We didn t know if it had come down to money or that our offer was contingent on the sale of our currently unlisted home, but we did know that with spring just around the corner, we were ready to get hurt again. With this understanding, we began preparing our house to sell, but my husband wanted to wait until we found a house to buy before we listed it, concerned by the very real possibility of finding ourselves homeless.
We spent our days obsessively monitoring our real estate portal. In a single weekend, we found two houses. We made an offer on the more expensive option first. We could only afford to offer $5,000 over asking. We lost to a cash offer of $30,000 over the asking price. We recovered quickly, offering on the other house we loved the next morning. In an effort to make up for our contingency offer, we decided to go bigger and offered $15,000 over asking. When our realtor gave us the bad ne