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I need advice with helping my difficult parents buy a house

Hey, guys.

Since May I've been helping my parents try to buy a house. My brother says that's not my responsibility, but since I speak better English than both of my parents and they like how I more or less work as a middleman, that's what I've been doing since then. The problem is that my dad wants something very specific and our realtor says that the current/foreseeable market makes it so that we have to act fast and not be so picky/difficult.

We've made offers on 3 or 4 houses and were just about to sign contracts, but at that point my parents would back away. With one house, it was because my dad didn't like the upstairs bedrooms. With the second house, he straight up just said it looked like a coffin, so he didn't want it. With the third house, he didn't want to do house hunting errands during the holidays, so by the time he was in the mood, the house slipped through our fingers. We didn't close on the recent house because they were told that some necessary repairs would be too expensive to deal with.

My parents are mainly looking around Long Island to find a 2-3 bedroom house with a backyard, basement (ideally finished), 1.5 bathrooms, a 5-10 minute walk to the local LIRR station, and a commute to the city that'd be around an hour or less. I keep trying to find houses for them on a daily basis, but things have been getting harder, and I don't want to keep putting time and effort into something that'll just keep happening. It also doesn't help that trying to help really stresses me out as I'm the peacekeeper between 4 different people.

My dad has blind faith that we'll eventually find the right house, but I'm not too sure about that. I know he means well, but the problem is that there's too much at play here, and I'm afraid that he's playing a game without really knowing all of the rules and what can happen if he doesn't conform to what it's asking of him.

I've told my parents to try to compromise and accept a 2 bedroom house with 1 bathroom, an unfinished basement, and a longer walk to the LIRR station, but they're both dead set on what they want. I really don't know how to approach this issue because I know what my parents want, but I don't know how to go about getting that.

What bothers me the most is that the hang up tends to be after the inspection has been made and the contracts need to be signed. I don't know if there's some way around this issue to prevent this from happening and making it so that we finally end up with a decent house that'll satisfy our basic needs.

I'm sure that I could probably provide more information that'll make it easier for you to help me, but I'm not sure what else I can write about.

Thank you for any and all help.

submitted by /u/christmas_throwaway4
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/RealEstate/comments/10kymwp/i_need_advice_with_helping_my_difficult_parents/
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