Trulia Voices | Top 10 Questions of the Week

If you’re a home buyer and have been wondering if now is a good time to buy, then this is the thread for you. We have home buyers, home sellers, renters and real estate agents all adding their 2 cents to the conversation. It’s quite informative as well as entertaining.

1. Ryan, a home buyer from St. Louis asks, “Open Opinion Thread: Why should someone buy in this market?”

His question has received 107 comments thus far. Check out some of the comments within this massive thread below.

Chandler, a home buyer from Maryland said, “I’m a buyer in maryland, and I have learnt a lot from this thread. One new thing that I learnt was looking the futures. That was an excellent link and reasonable indicator of investor confidence.”

Roger, our very own housing bear offers 9 reasonable arguments for home ownership in a down market:

Good reasons to buy now:

1. You’ve found a house you absolutely love and you just have to have it.
2. You have a job or a hobby that would be well-served by structural changes to the average dwelling (say, a recording studio or a ceramic kiln or what have you), and you can’t do that with a rental.
3. Similar to (ii): you’re tired of rental white and you want to paint every wall in your home a different shade of chartreuse.
4. You have animals that make it difficult or prohibitively expensive to find a place to rent.
5. You’ve been evicted from an apartment during a condo conversion, and you don’t want that to happen again.
6. You can’t stand the uncertainty or interpersonal relations involved in having a landlord.
7. Gardening is your life and the only places available for that are single-family homes, which are very hard to find as rentals.
8. You want to run a business out of your home, with occasional client visits to your office, and most apartment buildings in your area prohibit that (I don’t know if this scenario ever happens, though).
9. You smoke and there’s a city ordinance against smoking in rentals; owning your home is the only legal way to indulge your filthy habit.

Real estate pro Paul Francis said, “There is an old saying with investors — “You Make Your Money When You Buy” and that’s true with real estate as well.”

Real estate pro Jer Collins said, “For most people Real Estate is a long term OWNERSHIP investment which goes through Cycles of ups and down similar to other investment markets.”

Zack is a home buyer who said, “I never believed in the “wealth is created in real estate mantra” until I bough a rental property and watched people write me checks every month for more than my mortgage payment on the place . Nothing more comforting than that - someone building equity for you. So go ahead and rent - you will make some landlord very happy - as rents in my area have probably gone up 10%+ over the past 24 months.”

And now, for the rest of our top 10

2. Why do so many Realtors on Trulia post answers that are worthless?

3. What is the standard comission for selling a house?

4. Home list prices–how much can I reasonably expect them to come down during negotiations?

5. Chicago prices have remained stable Why dont newspapers cover this?

6. Why did the bank foreclose instead of accepting our offer to buy the condo?

7. We are first time home buyers and have found an intersting property (foreclosure).

8. I will be in Atlanta on Thu Apr 24 looking at homes in/near Midtown…..

9. 200K per year gross income - Currently renting at 1600 pm — Rent Vs Buy?

10. Would you trust this agent?