Plaidophile

Today my realtor (Kerri) had an open house at my condo. She said there was a lot of interest in my unit. Also when I got home from my "the owner shouldn't be present" exile one couple was still there, and the guy was another musician and he asked me how noise was. Fortunately I was there to fill in a detail which Kerri couldn't: basically no noise ever gets in, except through the front door (if someone's in the hallway) or through the windows (if they're open).

Meanwhile, Kerri also met a lot of my neighbors and can now espouse at length about how awesome everyone in the building is.

She can't have been too busy, since she read through the two topmost coffee table books on my coffee table, namely Red Eye, Black Eye (she loved it, and then I showed her the original page I bought from k.thor a couple months ago and she thought that was pretty cool too) and part of Corporate Capers (which I haven't read yet; I just have it because there was an advance reader copy in the discard pile at work and it sounded interesting), and also when I got there she had the Mariners game on (without sound since she couldn't figure out how to work my stereo), but I guess that's part of how open houses go.

She was telling me that even before the open house she'd gotten a LOT of interest from the other realtors in her agency, since apparently even though the bottom has fallen out on the housing market in Seattle, the "low-end" market is still going very strong. The main issue with the Seattle housing market is just that there's a hell of a lot of excess inventory in the "luxury condo" market (with all the trendy downtown conversions and so on), but for reasonably-priced stuff like, oh, a 2bed/1bath Nice Home in Ballard, there's still a lot of demand. So it's possible that there may even be a bidding war.

I think my timetable for the move down to San Francisco basically depends on how quickly my condo sale happens. If I get a contract on a sale soon, then I'll move right around the closing date, since then I can finally buy something in San Francisco. If it's looking like there won't be a sale very soon, though, I'll just have to move down and live with my sister for a few weeks until the sale does take place. (Well, I'll probably be living with my sister for a couple weeks anyway, while I search for actual housing, since short-term housing is such a pain to deal with and it can be pretty expensive for, say, a furnished studio with a monthly lease.)

If I do have a contract with a few weeks before closing, I wonder how I can go about starting the process of buying something else. Surely this is something that people have to deal with all the time. Can I do something silly like, say, use my equity on my old place for the financing on the new place? That'd be a very risky thing to do if the sale weren't guaranteed but if there's a set close date then it seems like that'd work pretty nicely. I do know that I can easily access about $10K of my home equity without any problem, and getting access to a home equity LoC on the primary mortgage would be pretty simple as well, and then also I can use access checks to make use of my credit cards to fill any remaining gap (I actually did use that for about $1600 of the down payment on the condo, which of course I paid off right away). But due to the daily-compounded interest on what would likely be around $40K or so, it's something I'd only want to do in an extreme circumstance. I guess I should get around to talking to a lender or mortgage broker in Oakland who can probably structure something much more reasonably than what I can do myself by temporarily maxing out my credit.

I have a tendency to want to do everything myself but there's certain things I should just let other people do. I've already learned to have other people deal with the aggravating parts of moving (boxing, shipping, storing, delivering) and I did end up using a mortgage broker when I bought my Seattle condo, and he was able to structure things in a much better way than I would have been capable of, since he actually knows the system, since it's his job to, and meanwhile it's not like a mortgage broker even costs the buyer anything since that's paid for by the banks.

I'm just always so tempted by ING Direct's "fixed closing costs" loans, and I've also always been very happy with ING Direct's service, whereas other lenders I've dealt with (Countrywide, Wells Fargo, National City) are always a huge pain in the ass. And the main trick that mortgage brokers do is they get a first mortgage with a decent down payment, and then a second mortgage as a home equity line of credit against that down payment, and use that to pay down more of the principal on the first one, which negates the need for mortgage insurance. On the other hand, I don't know if the mortgage insurance costs more than the amount of interest you end up paying on the home equity line (which is typically variable-rate and interest-only, and of course that variable rate is also higher than the rate on the first one).

Anyway, as far as the Seattle sale goes, since realtors may be showing the property to anyone at any time I need to keep my place clean (which is something I always try to do anyway but having an incentive helps!) and also keep Kerri's brochures and business cards and so on on my coffee table, so my living room always looks like a dang sales office. Oh well, I can deal with that.