Suddenly, we're out of the house buying race. Hosed completely by the sharp increase in mortgage rates, hordes of frantic buyers, and a drop in the number of properties on the market. Both our agent and our broker told us we can't buy a house at all right now in the areas we've been looking at, those oh so marginal areas where we hated ninety percent of what we saw, and lost out on the ten percent that we got serious about because we were outbid by tens of thousands of dollars each time.
"Have you thought about Union City?" said our broker. Well, no. We don't want to deal with the nightmare that is bridge traffic coming into Silicon Valley, or the vast ugly monotony of Union City for that matter. "Then you're out of luck," he said. "We can't loan you enough to buy where you were looking."
"Have you thought about San Bruno?" said our agent. We had, long ago, but since San Bruno, home of SFO International, is perpetually fog-shrouded all summer long, we were none too anxious to buy there. "Think about it again. There's nothing for you south of it. You can't afford anything you looked at before."
Hosed.
Maybe it will change a little later in the year. Or maybe we had a much shorter window of opportunity than we realized, and we screwed up permanently by not buying one of the really crappy houses we looked at just to get our foot in the proverbial door. The thought appalls me, the idea that in five months the market could have shot past us and left us out in the cold forever. No Redwood City. No San Carlos. No industrial Belmont, even. This leaves us contemplating a new search in new areas that mean much longer commutes, or reconsidering Mountain View. Frankly, I lean towards San Bruno. We'll see. Right now we're pretty depressed about that closed door.
All I wanted was someplace where I wasn't afraid to walk my dog at midnight, and we wouldn't have to spend $10K fixing up the place before we could move in, and there'd be enough room for our books. It wasn't a lot to ask. It wasn't. But we were marginal bets to begin with, not having half a million available for purchasing power, and so we stumbled right out of the starting gate. Didn't even place.
I guess we'll just have to sacrifice quality of life for the security of a mortgage one of these days. There's plenty of crap to buy out there. All we have to do is accept a much lower standard than we would have to anywhere else in this country. All we have to do is admit defeat.
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