Please watch HGTV prior to having an Open House

$500K is nothing for some people. I'm not saying that is right or makes sense, but I work for people who have built on additions that cost that. It's not what I would want, but it also not illegal- unless maybe you are Tony Soprano. There are counties about Manhattan where you couldn't buy a dog house for 500K.

Not that I thought that particular house was worth the $500k. And we do not plan on purchasing a home that expensive. We went to open houses with prices ranging from $360 - $500k so we could get an area of the different neighborhoods and what the different prices would yield.

Ideally we are looking in the low $400k area. We would consider something more expensive if it had everything we would like - where would not put any work into it.

Most places in the area though are older homes. And many being sold are old people downsizing so there is alot of updating to be done. Many have one bath, so we would want to add another bath. Just the type of properties in the area.

That is kind of what we want to do - I figure it is highly unlikely you will like the kitchen and bathrooms completely so if you buy something a bit less and use the extra to re-do some of the stuff.

Our thought is to pick the neighborhood and then the house.

One of my colleagues just did that. Coulda bought a completely renoed house on my street for 440k, instead she bought one two blocks north that needed work for about 320k - put in 80k - has her tiny dream house for 40k less than one that someone had renoed to their dream standards.

I kind agree ebeth.

The first house was originally just that front part. They bought it and built on. They had to work with the bones that were in place. I would never build a house from the ground up that looked like that. But, the original house was structurally sound, and it would have been wasteful to raze it.

The 2nd house will definately be town down, and someone will build what they want there. It's one of the original houses from back in the 50's

My house is ugly from the outside, just a long rectangular box. The inside, where it counts for me, is nice. It too started out as one of those 500 sq foot cottages, back in the 50's. Some really thoughtless people added strange additions on. By the time I bought it, it was shaped like the letter "U" with a weird extra dog leg stuck on. We basically, um, drew a parameter around the whole thing, and filled it in. All the original interior walls are gone, new roof, new exterior. Basically it was totally replaced in pieces. I would never suggest to anyone to do what we had to, but, we had to do it that way.

It's worth it now.

Here is the assessed values by town - and remember even in this market the town assessed values are usually lower than the market values:

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/specials/snapshot/snapshot_assessed_calues_massachusetts_homes_2011/

There are plenty of towns with low assessed values, however, they are either too far to commute to get to work and/or I wouldn't live there for safety reasons.

The towns we are looking at have an average value of $585k, $652k and $384k. All three also have low tax rates and highly rated schools in comparison to the surrounding towns. They all offer other great things that are important to us - recreation and great child friendly neighborhoods.

We are tending toward the $384k town (of course it is significantly less) - the $652 is of course the nicer and closet to work, but will also give less of a yard and more older homes. There just isn't much room to build more.

Don't mean to monopolize, but yeah, that's what we ended up doing, to an extreme.

Bought the house as a bank repo for I think $52K, put maybe 150K into it, now worth $450K or thereabouts.

It doesn't look like anyone's idea of a dream house. Except mine.

sorry linkat, I'll shut up now.

That's ok - it is good to hear other stories - we can learn from what others have done.

We have always bought a fixer-upper in a good neighbourhood and have sold easily. Our current house sold in 24 hours. We used the most experienced agent in our part of the city and took all his suggestions for staging to heart (well, except for painting the wood paneling in the rec room and he was still working on us when we got the offer -- it's real wood for crying out loud!) Mostly we had to "open up" the rooms -- not difficult since we had already got rid of some furniture. Someone already mentioned (Punkey?) taking down family photos. The weirdest suggestion, I thought, was to have nothing on the floor of the closet. Huh? But a neat, not stuffed, closet makes it look like you must have scads of storage space. I confess I am glad I only had to keep the place unrealistically staged for 24 hours (and no open house). Of course, when I cleared the floor in the master bedroom closet I discovered it was the only one we had never painted (the inside) so that was a rush job.

Ha, I just got thinking about a truly horrible place we saw when looking last time. It was tidy enough but someone must have told them they'd need to replace all the carpeting in order to sell -- so they did, with dusty rose carpeting. Unfortunately they did not repaint -- one bedroom was lime green, one was a sick-making yellow, one was robin's egg blue, the rest of the house was a mish mash of colour disasters, and yards and yards of dusty rose carpeting.

Exactly.

Closets are a big, big deal. Here in the land of old, old houses (ours is over 100 and it is typical), closets are tiny. Anything you can do to make 'em look better, you do.

I once looked at a house that had red tarten wallpaper in the toilet.

what were they thinking?

This is off the bad MLS pics site. It reminds me of when I was in my 20's and sharing an apt with another girl.

She would leave the kitchen with all the doors and drawers open constantly!
Ok Gretchen, you know you keep your peanut butter in the cabinet to the left of the stove. Do you really have to open 5 different doors before realizing it's right where you left it?
When I finally called her on this, she was honestly surprised that this was at all unusual.

How on earth did they get it to stick?

I hate to do this but..... bookmark.

Believe it or not the advise to show your home in the bast light is breaking down....the resale market is largely frozen, with the main buyers being all cash types who are looking to pick up stuff cheap, put a grand or so into a cleaning crew and paint, and then rent them out for the next 5-10 years. These people dont care much what the place looks like visually so long as the structure sound, in the right neighborhood, and they can fix the visuals with $1000 of illegal Mexican or better yet Korean labor. Every dollar and every hour that you put into fixing up for the showing is one that you will not get back, one more that will help make you bitter about the price you had to sell at.

I'm glad you're not my broker.

Yes we have taken down some of the family pictures and replaced them with scenic type things. That is another thing I noticed too many personalized type things. One house we went to not only had lots of family photos (although they were an attractive family), they also had a display case filled with all sorts of JFK crap. Again way to personalized and made a bit of a cluttered look - the rest of the house was nicely displayed though.

The one fortunate thing we have is lots of closets and closet space - although I am working on emptying as even with all we have - we had them stuffed.

maybe that wanted to show off how clean it was inside????