Most of the time I feel fortunate to live in the Seattle area in the Pacific Northwest. The one time that I don’t appreciate the Seattle area is during the drab months of winter and early Spring. This year seems to have been particularly dark, rainy and gloomy. I was hoping that my quick trip to Las Vegas would feed my body’s need for sun and warmth and while the weather was decent, it just didn’t do the trick.
If you’ve been reading the news much you know there is a small real estate crisis going on these days. In my area of the country that translates to properties losing upwards of 20% of their value. For other areas of the country the equity drops have been even more severe.
Take Phoenix and Las Vegas as examples. Not long ago you couldn’t buy a house there without a bidding war and frothy interest from investors everywhere. Oh how times have changed. I’ve been watching Craigslist for both of these areas and it’s surprising to see 2-3 year old houses selling for between $95K and $125K. Amazing.
There’s obviously a reason that prices have come down so much. There is far more supply than there is demand at this point and I’m guessing that won’t change any time soon. That’s good news for someone like me who is just a little bit tempted to grab a house down there nice and cheap. If I could split the house with one other family (like my sister), we could keep costs low and it would give us a place to go warm up in the winter. With my job, I could easily spend a week at a time down there working remotely with no problem. The only complication is my daughter is in elementary school so that would limit our travel time significantly.
These days I’m a tad bit wiser when it comes to figuring in operational costs for owning a place like that. Since we built our house out at the lake a couple years ago, I’ve become intimately familiar with pesky costs like taxes, power, HOA dues etc etc. While the outlay to buy a place down there is somewhat affordable at this point, I’m not sure I want to add more monthly expenses to our budget just so that I can enjoy warmth once in awhile. As tempting as it is to jump in and buy a place that I could someday use as a winter home, I’m leaning more towards just planning a couple winter trips down south to warm up. This would give me some time in the warmth and also minimize my total cost outlay.
So, I’ll continue to ponder the idea of buying a place in Vegas or Phoenix while the prices continue to stabilize a bit. At this point, I’m leaning towards holding off.