Buy house, condo or town house as 1st home?

>>969830
OC is ridiculously overpriced, especially Irvine.

>>969842
I work in Irvine. I've been commuting for the past 4 years (Long Beach to Irvine). I want to live closer to work and avoid the commute.

>>969830
Buy an apartment. It's little and you wouldn't spend time cleaning you home.

>>969830
You should consider renting and investing your savings instead. Take the percent interest you would be paying (as a positive number) if you bought a house. Add the interest you expect to earn if you invested that money. You should end up with a number between 7% (conservative) and 13%. Take that percent of whatever house you're looking at. For a 250k house, you're looking at 17.5k to 32.5k You can rent that expensive an apartment for about the same cost as owning that house.

>>969912
That's 17.5k to 32.5k a year, by the way. That doesn't even include things like HoA fees, housing tax, maintenance expenses, etc, which come out to about another 1.5% per year.

>>969830
Buy the cheapest home you can find. Take whatever the maximum you can afford and cut it in half.

Stalk the zillows and redfin for months, document homes and watch the sales, look for trends. Don't become emotionally invested in any property.

For a fist buy, look into condos, skip the fancy community areas (door men, pools, tennis courts, etc.) and buy for sqft and zipcode. Talk with HOA presidents and review HOA financials. HOAs are evil but there are some out there that are effectively inactive buy into those.

Aggressively pay the note on the property down, when you are ready to move rent it. Rinse, repeat.
Stay the hell away from renting property.

>>969912
Not OP but i would prefer to buy a house. The payments are cheaper than an apartment and you dont throw away the investment. It feels like burning money. A house will always have value because you can sell it. Try selling your apartment, i dare you

I can only give generalizations.
Condos and townhouses, last to rise, first to fall. Often mismanaged.
Neighborhood protects against underclass invasion

houses run the risk of underclass invasion. but that is easy to spot if your eyes are open.

File: 1421811032498.jpg (33KB, 540x537px) Image search: [Google]

33KB, 540x537px

>>969928
>Stay the hell away from renting property.
This was my motto when I was 23 and starting looking for a place to buy.

Then I found out even trailer parks around me are 80k on average. Massachusetts, not even once.

>>969928
Top tier advice.

>>969968
Jesus USA's property market is culturally complex. Underclass invasion through HUD Section 8, and white flight, etc just makes investing in proerty there too complex.
It really is mind boggling to think that in the space of a few years a beautifull crafted home in a nice street can become a money pit in a crack suburb.

>>969830
Go to your local government website.
Look up Strategic planning, Town planning, urban planning initiatives for your region.
Here you'll find things like large public works, beautification initiatives, economic rezoning, etc.
Knowing what's happening works great in two ways the first is knowing what not to buy. If you find a home out the back that is cheap you may find its a fault line or flood zone or bushfire prone overlays will tell you this, or that a future sewage treatment plant or landfill or airport (airports arent necessarily bad) is going in near there.

On the flipside it can tell you things like employment generators being constructed near there, maybe a huge shopping mall or university or hospital, something a number of years away which people will want to live near (just as you want to live near your job)
Strategic planning is the first place to start when looking for a long term holding.

Anyway good luck chief

>>969950
You lose 6% on realtor fees when you sell a home. Also, try seeing how much you're paying up to any given month with a house, and make sure to include the down payment. If you pay off most of your home immediately, you might save money in the long term. Otherwise you're not saving anything.

Be very careful of condos. Make sure you understand how much the regime fees are, and what that $ is used for. Check into the management company that runs the regime/HOA - look for BBB complaints, etc.

In general condos are only a good investment when they are in God-tier locations (beach, downtown artsy district) where there aren't any median to low level residential districts nearby.

No matter what you buy, its never going to be worth more than its most equivalent substitute.