Really Estate
Its a gentleman in deed. Recite the scroll to release the landowner.
Everyone's always talking about evolution for animals but nobody talks about evolution for the laws of nature? Get ready because I heard gravity 2.0 is coming out soon. They’re going to make it easier to fly and balance things, and if you moonwalk, you can slide dimensions.
Welcome to the Duckstack everybody, the Duckstack where YOU are the reader! No other Duckstack even comes close to this genuine experience. Today for the benefit of friends and family I’m going to provide a guide, a tutorial if you will, an introduction, to the home buying process. Oh I know the old objection, “I’ve already bought millions of homes, this is all old news” and that may be right, but there’s never any harm to regrounding yourself in the basics! Come, gather your little herd of houses, sit by the fire, and listen to a story.
WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING
Tips and tricks for getting ready for your new baby house.
Supposing you have an income, you may find yourself in the situation where you are eligible to buy a house. Pick a random financial institution (your bank, a dedicated mortgage agency, NASA, or your real estate agent’s in-house butcher shop) and get prequalified. This is when you tell them you make money, and they tell you with that kind of money they’d probably lend up to this amount, which you should probably take $100k off the top of to keep your monthly payments sane. This number is your HOUSE BUYING MAGNIFYING SCOPE™1 which tells you what houses to look at. They’ll give you a letter which you’ll use as a badge to make offers.
An offer is when you say “okay lets tell the seller we’ll buy it” and your buyers agent says “no.” This repeats until you concede that you need to buy it at $15k over the asking price. Sometimes the agent will try to persuade you to make your offer more “competitive” in various ways, such as paying your lender more money, paying the seller’s agent more money, or letting the seller keep the toaster. As with all your interactions throughout this whole process, this is all smokescreen and all anyone cares about is the bottom line. So, lets say you manage to outbid House Buyers Inc. and the dozens of career home investors you’re competing with, and the seller accepts your offer. What then?
When you go to buy a house, and the seller accepts your offer, the first thing you will feel is dozens of hands in your pockets. Your agent wants a cut, the brokerage has fees, the escrow company has fees and wants a check, the title company has fees and wants a check, the lending agency has fees, and Uncle Sam or the British Uncle Equivalent (Uncle Mohammed?) definitely smells your blood and has a gun to your head instantly for that sweet sweet cash you are imagining paying for this property. Your real estate agent will make clear, if you want this house, you need to give money to homeowners insurance, to mortgage insurance, to escrow, to each deity in the Roman pantheon, to the homeless, and, as an afterthought, to the seller.
Then, you play a lengthy game of telephone tightrope, seeing how many people can pass the same message across without it getting corrupted. The minimum message length is three people, and the game has about 15 players. You aren’t allowed to talk to any of the people directly- If you have a concern about, say, radioactive construction materials, you will need to ask your agent to ask their agent to ask their seller about the half life of cement or whatever, and the seller will then tell their agent to tell your agent to tell you that they’ll “ask around” and “get back to you on that.”
You’ll need a lender unless you can pay in cash. If you had the cash to buy a house outright why didn’t you just say so? You are too rich to be reading this, just do what you normally do and dump buckets of money on the owner until they submit. For the rest of you: Every lender starts with the same number, and that number is a percent, which is the interest rate of the day. This number is decided by demons. The only concessions they can offer you are taking cash off the "closing costs2” and “fees3”. You can also bribe them to give you a lower rate, a process known as “buying points”, which will cause them to charge you additional fees. Unless you plan on paying off the house at the slowest rate possible4, this is a bad idea. You want to talk to three to five different mortgage brokers for quotes. Then, each mortgage agent will accuse each of the other agents of lying. Ignore everything they say, and focus on the lowest rate, the lowest cash to close, and the biggest lender credits/rebates5. Once you’ve picked one, you send them every document the government and the bank has ever issued you, and they start the process of your loan.
All of this is on a tight deadline for no reason but its really really important you feel rushed so that you don’t shop around or make right decisions. This is the job of your buyer agent: to make things that aren’t important seem really important so that you miss important things. You pay them to rush you in a supportive, encouraging sort of way. If you’re too tech illiterate to use the internet without dialup, you're also paying them to help you find a house. Your buyer's agent also, in a pinch, provides such services as “tells you if its bad to have a 50 year old water heater in the house” and “refer you to someone who pays them to refer them to you”. They are not middle men, they’re meddle men6, and no matter what they say about being “on your team” remember that the worse of a deal they get you at the end of the day the more money they make. They’re greedier than used car salesmen and twice as shameless, but worse, because they feel like they’re part of a holistic medicine MLM rather than like an obsolete government agency that forces you to do all the work on a Windows XP computer, which is more what they really are.
You may think I’m being too hard on them, because your agent was different, your agent was nice to work with and “worked really hard”. Don’t get me wrong, they will do their job, I am pretty sure the only reason we got our current house is because our agent under the table made some shady deal with the seller’s agent to get them to take our offer over the other, better offers. So, they’ll do their job7, and you, you will have paid them about $1000 an hour to do so. (I like to exaggerate, but this is not an exaggeration. This is what it worked out to, if not more). You will find that all real estate agents are incredibly desperate to convince others of the value they bring to the table. Think of them as a sort of a third world tour guide who points out all the stores and contractors they have deals with. If you don’t want to worry about where to go and who to get to do what, that’s the value.
Once you’ve got the money all settled, you’ll have a “closing meeting” where you’re given hundreds of documents to physically sign which to release the title company, your lender, and your real estate agent and everyone else, from liability for selling you this house. Then, you just wait for all the checks to cash, and your real estate agent will perform the high skilled labor they went to night school to get licensed for: to extract the house keys from a box and hand them to you. At this point, all you need to do is live there, pay bills, and not mess it up. Congratulations on the purchase. GLHF!
HISTORY
Never before in history has anyone hurt like this I bet.
An Unidentified Foreign Injury (UFO) occurred at an unspecified time on Monday, the 28th, at 10:03 AM. The injury was spotted in the neck in the wee hours of the morning by a groggy and handsome well-dressed man in the comforts of his own home under as far as we know no influence of drugs- the injury was noticed because it hurts really bad and I can’t really move my neck now under threat of death and extortion. Who could have done this to me? Answer: two pillows, sleep, and some very advanced math involving just the right degrees to render the back of my neck in a permanent state of charley horse. Physical injury and vaccines8, that’s my kryptonite.
The little one is getting into face painting, but not with just one marker or one piece of makeup, no. He has taken under advisement best industry practices and diversified his portfolio, and whatever it is we can’t wash any of it off.
He has discovered, I don’t know if I’ve written about this before, the joys of sharing. By this I mean if he wants candy, he’ll bring out candy for everyone and begin distributing it, hoping we’ll just open it for him and he’ll be able to blend in and partake without anyone noticing.
He’ll share other things too in similar fashion- at a park he found a stick (he loves sticks boys love sticks) and he immediately found some more and started distributing them: “One for me, one to papa…”, so that we can all walk around whapping the ground with ‘em. So. Cute.
"Vormittagsspuk" (1928) [ORIGINAL SILENT VERSION] - Hans Richter, German Dadaist Film
"Vormittagsspuk" say it back
"Vormittagsspuk" (1928) [ORIGINAL SILENT VERSION] - Hans Richter, German Dadaist Film is a German dadaist silent film which I first witnessed being played live at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Paris, France. The Nazis were really savage barbarians, and part of their regime was to destroy what they termed “degenerate art9” They destroyed the audio of this, but the film lives on. In our hearts, in our dreams, on Youtube.
This is what all real estate agents call it
The lender charges you usually about $5000 to end the house, which goes to “home insurance appraisals fees documents and Our Imagination”. Different lenders have slightly different fees so this is what you’re comparing.
“you hurt my fee fees!” - The last lender I worked with
If you know that you’re not disciplined enough to ever make progress on the loan or budget a payment larger than the minimum, maybe this would make sense.
I worked with homie once and they paid for the house appraisal for me.
I’d be a lot more cool with them if they were “Metal Men”
which is… What, exactly?
This is a reference for people who know how bad of a reaction I had to the covid vaccine.
‘Course, can’t look at modern Pride parades and feel quite a bit of sympathy for that position.