AaronBaecker.com

The Washingtonian had a great feature story this month on the rise and fall of the housing market in the D.C. metro area over the last 10 years, or so.  The story was really more a collection of quotes taken from over 100 interviews that were conducted for the article, but they told a compelling story from every side of the housing industry.

On a personal level, my wife and I experienced the craziness first-hand back in 2005, or so.  We had decided at the time to look into buying our first home.  We contacted a real estate agent who proceeded to warn us before we ever looked at a single home that:

1. We needed a pre-qualification letter from a lender that the seller would consider acceptable (i.e. – a local lender – and preferably the agency’s own in-house mortgage unit (ha!))
2. We needed to be willing to waive inspection or the seller would likely choose another buyer.
3. If we liked any of the homes we saw, we needed to be prepared to write an offer – preferably the same day – because homes weren’t staying on the market for much longer than a few days to a couple weeks.

We ended up looking at several homes in areas that we didn’t really want to live in, with layouts that weren’t very attractive, at prices that made me want to gag.  Luckily for us, we had the willpower to pass on the deals entirely and remain renters.  It’s certainly easy to see how so many others got caught up in the frenzy, however.  There seemed to be such pressure to “act now, or you may miss the bus,” that those who were new to the game may have felt that they had no choice.  I feel I’m better for having gone through that and it’s nice to see how time has made those days seem all the more incredible.

Read an excerpt here:  http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/homegarden/15489.html