Real Estate Stories

The house we live in now is the 3rd house we have owned, so this means we are now looking for our 4th house. We are not the kind of people who just look at a few houses and settle on one. We look at a lot of houses. Actually we first look at a lot of MLS listings. In the old days our realtor would give us reams of listings. These days we hunt on the the internet using Realtor.com and Yahoo Real Estate. We also always drive around. And drive around. And drive around.

When we married we first lived in an apartment attached to a workshop on Angel Lane in Odessa, next to Susan's best friends. We wanted to buy in Odessa but could not afford it. We looked in Lutz and found a cute small wood frame house in downtown Lutz and made an offer.
Unfortunately the house did not appraise for what it was bieng sold for. So we kept looking and looking and looking. We finally found our first house in outer Forest Hills. A 1958 concrete block with one owner. We lived there for 5 years. We then moved to a house in Pasco Lutz, off of SR 54 where we lived for 3 years in a 1981 Ranch style. Finally we moved to Seminole Heights. Over the years in house hunting we have driven down every street in Seminole Heights, Tampa Heights, Wellswood, Riverside Heights, Forest Hills, Lutz, Odessa, and a fair amount of Land O' Lakes, North Tampa and Carrollwood. We have taken forays into Town and County, Plant City, Zephyrhills, and Welsey Chapel.


So. Some of my peeves. Houses without flyers. Houses with flyers with missing info. No price. Just monthly mortgage payment but no overall price (always on an investor house). No square feet listed. Or when we look on Realtor.com or Yahoo we don't always get an address or there is no photo or data is missing. Realtor tricks

We have seen some interesting houses.
We looked at one house a couple of weeks ago. The owners had unfinished addition. Very unfinished. The concrete floor looked as if the person finishing it stopped for a smoke and never came back. One window never installed, just plywood over the whole. The realtor indicated the owner said all permits were finalized. We were given to understand that the work had been done recently. A check of building permits revealed there was no permit for the work and there was a 1995 citation for illegal construction. I called the realtor and told her she needed to get back to her clients and get the truth.

A house we looked at last night had a lot of deferred maintenance. There were cobwebs all over the place, as if they never cleaned since they moved in. They had put in pergo type floating floors that crinkled when we stepped on them. In the master bedroom, the glued down wooden floor (over concrete) was of different heights for some bizarre reason. One board would be a 1/4 inch lower than the one next to it alll through the bedrooom. I am still not sure why that was. There were gaps between some of the boards.

Sometimes I would walk out of a house just shaking my head wondering what the people were thinking.

Note: We have seen a lot of very nice houses.