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Is it even possible to be a cautious buyer in this market?

My husband and I have bought and sold three houses since 2013. Not really strategically, we just moved a lot but we have learned a lot of lessons along the way from dealing with a horror story of a different variety in each home. One thing we did finally learn is to be a cautious buyer, to ignore the aesthetic and focus on the meat and bones of a home, the roof, the crawl space, the attic..

Our market area right now has people plunking down huge amounts of due diligence money in order to ‘win’ against the massive competition. We really, really don’t like this. In our other three sales we never did more than a thousand dollars due diligence. The idea of blasting 10k into the universe in the hopes that the inspection won’t reveal some massive issues just doesn’t sit right with us. We just will not do it.

Speaking of inspection, lots of folks are waiving those! I mean, what? How can we compete with people who are putting up 10k due diligence and waiving inspections? And do we even want to, because those people are idiots (in my opinion.) Sellers have a great opportunity right now to unload lemons and I go to every showing assuming the seller is trying to screw us. This is a negative outlook I know but I don’t want to give the benefit of the doubt into a money pit. The last house we saw yesterday had the crawl space padlocked shut. So I am supposed to piss 10k into the wind, waive an inspection and not even see the guts of this house with my own eyeballs? How the hell am I supposed to make an offer without even seeing in there?

I can sense my agents frustration at our level of caution. I am wondering if it’s just not even going to happen for us right now. We are currently renting and are not desperate to buy. However we prefer to be paying into an asset and we have the money to buy. I’m just not willing to be reckless, is anyone managing to buy right now who isn’t just playing real estate roulette?

submitted by /u/Dingus_Guide
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/RealEstate/comments/ov65xo/is_it_even_possible_to_be_a_cautious_buyer_in/
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