The Thin Red Line

First off a hat’s off  to Cecilia Sherrard’s Cleveland Ohio Real Estate Blog,  which every day provides great advice for home buyers and sellers alike.  Today’s book, Buying A Home by the Better Business Bureau is a well-written  and down-to-earth "must read" for the first time home buyer.  Covering all the details from getting pre-qualified for a mortgage (an often overlooked, "must-do" first step) to the potentially confusing details of escrow and closing, Buying A Home offers detailed and specific step by step advice for the home buyer.   I was especially impressed by all of the detailed advice for things the buyer needs to do before beginning to look at homes,  not only pre-qualifying for a mortgage but also zeroing in on a neighborhood, learning about the current economic environment ("buyer’s market" vs "seller’s market") and finding the right real estate agent to work with.

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Lately Ron and I have become regular viewers of a show on HGTV where two rather pompous designers visit with the owners of homes that have been on the market for awhile and haven’t sold and advise them on changes they should make in order to get their homes sold.   What I find most striking is that in the episodes we’ve seen so far all but one of the hapless home owners has followed the advice (neutralize, Neutralize, NEUTRALIZE!!) and still not found a buyer.  The one exception is a home owner who was still contemplating whether or not to follow the designer’s advice when she received an offer and sold the house Without  "neutralizing" it.   And therein perhaps lies an object lesson for the designers preaching the gospel of Neutrality.

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When I was a high school senior I had a sociology class, taught by a really nice man who was not a very stern disciplinarian. One day during a unit on group communications we did an experiment: The teacher whispered a sentence to the first person on row 1 and each student in turn whispered to the next until the message had been passed through every person in the room and the last person spoke the sentence out loud. The original sentence: "There’s a house for sale on the corner." What made it to the other end of the room: "Some midgets on the corner want to buy rubbers."

Somewhere along the way, someone (coughs and shuffles feet) changed the "house" for sale to a "condominium" for sale. And then the message passed through a crucial exchange, between "Dixie", a very smart girl whose brilliance was often obscured by her heavy old New Orleans Yat accent (’hay dawlin’, where ‘ya at?’) and "Ray", a pleasant, easy going guy we all knew was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Dixie tells Ray there’s a "condominium for sale" and he looks blank and whispers back ‘what the hell’s a condominimum?’. Dixie gives him a real kind look and whispers back ‘aw, you know Ray, like a rubber for a midget’. It was interesting lesson, though not perhaps the one Coach "Libbadoux" had in mind.

Unfortunately, many consumers are little more sophisticated than my former classmate in understanding the details of condominiums, co-operatives and town-homes, three increasingly common forms of home ownership that depending on where you live and how much you make may be the only realistic chance you will ever have of owning your own home. Having written about my dream of building a log mansion in the woods, it got me to thinking seriously about buying a home and as always I brought home a huge stack of books to learn more.

You only need to hear one thing about condo’s, co-ops, & townhomes by Mark B. Weiss. Don’t Bother. When he stops being a mindless cheerleader for the real estate development industry, it is only to talk down to the reader. To quote Ron quoting Dorothy Parker, "It isn’t the sort of book that should be set aside lightly. It is the sort of book that should be hurled away with great force" (to the rubbish bin.)

how to Buy a Condominium or Townhome (no image, Worldcat) by real estate attorney Irwin E. Leiter is a significantly more useful book. In clear and concise language Leiter explains in detail all of the legal complexities of owning a home in an association with other homeowners. This guide would be an excellent resource both for someone at my former classmate’s level of understanding who wanted to know what this type of home ownership is all about and for someone seriously considering purchasing a unit in this type of community who needs to understand the legal complexities of their potential purchase. Recommended.

More books on home ownership next week.

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