Apparently it’s not as easy to buy a home as I expected. I ignorantly thought that we’d see a house we could picture ourselves living in, present an offer to the seller, go back and forth with the seller over the price once or twice, sign some papers, and then bam, we’d have a house.

Not in this market.

Unfortunately, we’ve decided to buy a house in a boom market. For the 2nd time in a year, our timing choice for a major life change really sucks.

The market is completely out of control right now. There is so little inventory available that sellers are getting multiple offers and well over asking.

Why is this happening? Because interest rates are so low that people think they can afford anything and are literally losing their minds. OK, I’m not an economist and there is more to it than that but I’m sure the lower interest rates are playing a huge role. For instance, our bank has offered us a 1.65% interest rate. That is absolutely nutso. Reminder, I’m in Canada, so I can only lock that interest rate in for 5 years, not 30. But still, it’s pretty nutso.

So how’s it going for us?

So far we’ve made 2 offers. Our first offer we were pretty sure wouldn’t be considered, but we really loved the house and figured it was worth trying. The house was dated but livable, had a beautiful view, and a great yard in a neighbourhood where yards hardly exist. We offered $10K over asking. The seller received 7 offers and ended up selling for $60K over asking. Cool, cool, didn’t want it anyways.

The 2nd house we offered on we really fell in love with. It was 25 minutes or so out of the city in a rural-esque neighbourhood. It was simply but tastefully updated, had a nice yard and was on a nice street. We really really loved it. We offered $28K over asking. Immediately after we gave our number to our realtor I had some feelings of regret wondering if we were being stupid and were offering way too much for the neighbourhood and area. Apparently not. This house also received 7 offers and 3 of those offers were more than $40k over asking. We don’t know the final sales price yet but it probably landed somewhere between $40K and $50K over asking. Cool, cool, didn’t want it anyways. Just kidding I really did. I cried myself to sleep over this one. I also made a photo of the house as my cell phone background. I was completely rational and level-headed about the entire thing.

So anyways, it’s not going well. We went to look at another house on the weekend, I didn’t love it. It was in a decent neighbourhood, the upstairs was partially renovated, the downstairs was straight out of the 70s, it was next to an RV campground and ultimately we decided we didn’t want it. Our realtor told us it received 10 offers.

I’m not sure what we’ll do now. We refuse to get into a bidding war. On each of the houses we offered on we offered what we knew would be our maximum price. While we’d really like a house, we don’t want to get caught up in the madness taking place right now and end up feeling like we overpaid. However, in this market, we may never buy a house if we don’t “overpay.”

My hope is that as we enter Spring, more houses will come on the market which will give buyers more choice and maybe tame the madness a little. Unfortunately no one can predict the future so for now we’ll just try our best to stay rational and be grateful for the roof over our head and that as non-home-owners, we don’t have to worry about a single cost other than rent and utilities.