We started casually entertaining the idea of buying a house at the end of October 2008, about a month after the economy of Earth fell into a burning cauldron of hellfire. People like us just fluttered our fingers Montgomery Burns style and muttered, “Excellent”. See, we had been saving money, but not as fast as prices had been going up. Was it our chance?

Our first appointment with a listing agent didn’t go so well. It didn’t really go at all. Armand, our real estate developer friends Dina and Welly, and I waited outside the house for an hour. Dina and Welly, being folks who really know what they’re looking at, were really wonderful to come with us – folks who hadn’t a clue. After 6 phone calls he finally returned one an hour after he was supposed to meet us at the house. He said that he had gotten trashed the night before, crashed at a buddy’s place, and asked us to wait for another half and hour so he could stop for donuts. Wow. It’s one thing to do that, a whole different thing to say that. His name is Sky Minor.

Trying to buy a house in Los Angeles for under $200,000 was going to get frustrating. Frustrating? Oh – pardon me. I meant to say interesting.

The holidays were fast approaching, I was doing a production of The Light in the Piazza (my favorite piece ever written) till February 15th, more banks were dying, and it looked like we were going to have some time, so I took the next couple of months to educate myself. My friends, Steve and Annie, had just bought a house so they had a lot to share about the process. They worked with a really wonderful agent, Ambra Bisconti. We gave Ambra a call at the end of January.

The full-on house hunt had begun!

These are the websites I used:
themls.com (official listings)
redfin.com (my favorite)
zillow.com (has the most info on all properties)
frontdoor.com
trulia.com

I made a master list of contenders based on this criteria: price (under $200,000), location (northeastern Los Angeles – zip codes 90027, 90031, 90032, 90039, 90041, 90042, and 90065), bedrooms (at least 2), and lot square footage (over 4000). The condition of each property didn’t matter – we new that big time fixers were the only ones in our price range.

Starting with a virtual look at hundreds of properties online, I narrowed it down to 82 worth an actual physical look.

During this process, Armand got pneumonia. Awful.

I decided to look by zip code. My GPS and I headed out each morning and crawled around each area, driving up to 23 houses in one day. In most cases I couldn’t get inside the house, but I got enough information to either keep the house on the list or cut it. The list got narrowed down to about 20-30 houses. This list I gave to Ambra. She gave me the key codes for most of them (foreclosures) and set up appointments for the regular sales. Ambra advised us to cut out short sales, so we did, and I’m glad.

Now the list was down to 7 finalists. Armand was still sick as a dog. I showed him my favorite one first, naturally. It took 2 1/2 weeks to get him around to see all 7, as sick as he was. It was February 27th and we were now ready to make an offer on my favorite! Unfortunately, so was the developer who made an all cash offer the day before.

We cried. At this point, I had looked at everything in the northeastern chunk of Los Angeles. Everything. Even burned-out shells from fires and one house being occupied by a pack of wild dogs.

The next day Ambra sent us another listing that had just come up, now bring the total houses considered to 83. We looked. We loved. We were so happy that we lost the first house!

We made an offer. We had offered asking price, $186,500, since we didn’t want to lose it over chump change. Our offer was accepted! Normally, one gets a response around here in 12 hours. We had to wait 9 days. 9 days! They got 3 offers the first day that the house was on the market. The other folks lost the house by $1500 and $6500. We now had 45 days to close, with inspection deadlines, loan deadlines, and miscellaneous deadlines along the way.

The process of buying a foreclosure is the same as a regular sale in California, with the exception that you’re pretty much buying it as is. What made buying the house difficult were the levels of folks who just didn’t care. The house was owned by a bank, who then hired an asset management company, who then hired a listing agent. The listing agent was just about as on top of things as Mr. Donuts in the beginning of this story. No one actually needed to get the house sold. It wasn’t their house. Their lives didn’t depend on anything.

Day after day, I had to drop everything to get paper to the right person by whatever deadline. Ambra had to yell at folks through the whole process. At one point I was stopped at a red light in East L.A. crying on my steering wheel because if I didn’t get that 9A report from the listing agent by 5:00pm it was going to cost me thousands of dollars. All this time, we’re getting dangerously close to the end of April and we didn’t want to cough up another month of rent.

While this drama was playing itself out, I had an incredible experience with Actors Federal Credit Union. Ryan in the mortgage department was there at every step of the way to walk us rookies through. I had joined the credit union 9 years ago in hopes of getting a mortgage there one day. I am so happy that it all worked out. We put 20% down and got an interest rate of 4.65%.

Inspections went well, we got our mortgage, and all systems were go. Our mortgage payment was going to be less than half of our rent. Sweet!

We closed on April 27th, the day after my birthday. What a wonderful present!

I am really happy that I looked at so many houses. I know that we got the best available house in our price range, and I learned so much with every house I visited.

So here we are. We’ve lived here for 5 months now, and even in a state of demolition, we are loving it – because it’s ours.