Buying vs Selling

Now that we have found a place to live, I've had some time to think about a few things...like which is harder, buying a house or selling a house? I suppose the answer is dependent upon an individual's situation. For us I think it was a toss up.

Our previous house sold in a market that was a sellers market and the competition was tight. In order to get a good price we had to make it look great. So we spent a lot of time, effort and money making it look good. And we had a pest inspection done before it went on the market in order to fix things that we weren't even aware of. Our previous house had some awkward unique features to it and we were worried that those things would turn away potential buyers. Some of the people who looked at the house called out those items. It only takes that one buyer that likes what they see and the house is sold. I would go on line, look at the comparable houses in the area, notice how nicely they were staged and I knew that I had make the house look the absolute best that it could. It had to stay that way throughout the time it was on the market to the day the papers were signed. We had a great realtor, it was priced right, and it sold before a week was up. But it was also a lot of work.

Buying a house in this area is also work. The market is very tight. The inventory is low and the buyers are many. We knew if we were to buy a house that we would be looking almost every day. Many of the houses we saw went for higher than asking price. It is the norm for this area. It seems like the sellers here know they have the upper hand and they don't put forth as much effort to make their houses look great in order to sell. So we had to look past the clutter to see the potential in many of the houses. The contingency period, that time where buyers and sellers negotiate the details of the transaction, was more difficult for us as buyers than it was being a seller.

In our case we are fortunate that we have a place to stay while we find a house. If negotiations didn't work out on a house we could back off and look for another one. So in our case being a buyer was just as hard as being a seller.