TL;DR: Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home. Minimum.
Cash I understand, but what’s the reasoning behind sellers preferring regular loans instead?
USDA isn’t gonna buy a fixer upper. they want people to have safe housing. this might mean the seller is going to need to fix the problems
for us, we liked that, but it did mean we lost our on a couple bids. which was good: we found a real jewel.
In a hot market/location this will never happen. Even with a regular loan there’s a bidding war on houses with obvious issues.
i live in a hot market. i got one. it was a slog, but it happened.
edit: we were approved in november. we put in multiple offers and had to periodically get re-approved by the usda, but we had an offer accepted mid march and closed in april.
for a brief period, we kept the “apartment in the city” for a month and moved one sub-compact car worth of belongings across town every night. not really relevant, but i’m going to remember fondly the brief time that we kept an apartment in the city, because that shit is never gonna happen again for poor schlubs like us.
Yeah, sellers (flippers really) are asking 70-80k over the value of the house, and they want no-inspection, as is, and you need to bring cash to the closing to cover appraisal gap, which is usually in the 60-100k range.
We need to start taxing unoccupied single-family home at their list price. There is no incentive to sell at a reasonable price.
This. The inspection and repair criteria are higher than for private lending. We sold our house to someone using this program and had to fix stuff that we didn’t need fixed when we bought the house. It wasn’t a huge deal but it did add a week to the process to get it fixed and reinspected.
