Housing Market.

Virginia and I have recently been trying to figure out whether or not we are going to take advantage of the ‘buyer’s market’ here in Corpus Christi. We like many things about where we live now; the neighborhood, the vicinity to the bay, work, and downtown, the old feeling of our house, and the hardwood floors. What we don’t like: the fact that it has one bathroom, the small kitchen, no dishwasher, and no fence in the backyard (for a dog).

We have looked in every area of Corpus Christi: Del Mar area (where we are now), the Southside, downtown, on the Island, etc. We most like the old, charming section of town (Del Mar). We’d like to find one that we can fix up, and have been attracted to homes that have lots of big windows, 3 bedrooms, 1+ baths, hardwood floors, back decks, interesting roof lines, and ones that seem easily refurbishable. We scour Remax for homes in the 78404 zip code. We like the following:

House 1
House 2
House 3

There’s also an interesting website where you can search by address to find out what kind of taxes the current owners pay and the history of the price of the house. This could obviously help in filtering out ridiculous asking prices by doing your own comps in the area — you can search by street, and that way gather an idea about how much similar houses on the same street are priced per square foot.

The only thing that we worry about is whether or not we’d be able to recoup our costs if we were to move in less that 5 years. We don’t have any firm plans yet, but definitely don’t want to leave ourselves hung out to dry.

Another completely different option that I’ve actually been thinking quite seriously about lately: communal living. I’ll save that for a later post. Let me know what you think about the houses or the housing market.