The House

Ok, so here’s the house that we went and saw. Both C and I love the location and the fact that it’s a single family home. There are not a lot of houses in the areas of SF we would prefer to live in. The areas where we would love to live have a lot of condos and TICs (which seem to be a SF only phenomenon) I still do think prices are going down a bit, but not as significantly as before. Also, there are only so many single family houses in SF. Maybe I'm just trying to justify something that wouldn't be a wise financial decision, but I don't think it'll be a bad one since it will provide shelter and we would get a cash flow positive place if we rented it out. I'm pretty sure that it would be cashflow positive since we would put down a significant amount.

However, both C and I were under whelmed by the house. It is listed as a 4 bedroom with 1 bedroom on the bottom floor. That was fine, but then that room was used as a dining room because the dining table in the kitchen can only fit a small 2 person table. That left 3 bedrooms upstairs. The master bedroom was a good sized one, but the other 2 bedrooms were pretty small.

Originally when I saw the listing, I thought we could rent out the room on the bottom floor to a friend to make the cash flow even better (and affordable if I were to lose my job or want to go on an extended unpaid maternity leave). But the fact that renting out the bottom room would prevent us from having a place to consume meals and 2 of the 3 bedrooms upstairs were small made it not so attractive for us.

Anyways, there was no way we were going to pay anywhere close to the list price. We wanted about a 20% discount, but it’s not worth the effort since we’re ho-hum about house.

It’s very rare for a house to come on the market in this area. It’s even more rare for it to be somewhat in our price range. Here's hoping for a better house next time!