When Choosing Property You'll Buy . . .

Discussion in 'Buying & Selling Real Estate' started by Rainman, Sep 18, 2015.

  1. Rainman

    Rainman Senior Investor

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    There are people who'll buy only property which is close to where they live. They know the place well enough and will only buy property if they are certain that they'll profit from it. They'll also be able to inspect the property regularly and keep it well maintained. While in theory this is a great strategy, chances are if you buy only property that's close to where you live, you'll miss out on better deals elsewhere.

    Question: when buying property do you ever take into account how close it is to where you live?
     
  2. Corzhens

    Corzhens Senior Investor

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    I agree on the proximity. When we started planning to buy a house of our own, since we were renting, our first step was to search high and low for a house that is being sold in our town. However, houses there costs around 4 million pesos ($100k) on the average while our our budget was only 1.1 million pesos. In the adjacent town, we still cannot afford the houses so we were left with the town a bit farther from our place. Fortunately we are now living in that town that is 15 kilometer away from our original home.
     
  3. MakeDollarsSense

    MakeDollarsSense Well-Known Member

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    I think scouting out new areas to buy can prove far more profitable than just staying within a comfort zone of areas you know and live in. For instance, my parents own a house in a rural town in Northern California. They know that the area will retain or appreciate in value as it close to the Bay Area where there is a lot of business, and it is low in crime. Instead of investing in more property in the same town where you may find it harder to find regular tenants, in case you were to have people moving out, they bought in a much larger city an hour away. They did some scouting of the city to find desirable neighborhoods and found something comparable to what they could find in our home town. It took some leg work, but was worth the time for the investment in the grand scheme of things.
     
  4. pwarbi

    pwarbi Senior Investor

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    Where the property is will be on the list of things to look at, but not really near the top. To me its more convenient is the property is local, but there's more important things to consider in my opinion.
     
  5. 111kg

    111kg Guest

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    It really depends of several factors. For instance, if it's going to be a rental property, then you don't really have to care how far away from your house they are. However, if you want a house of your own, I'd really choose a house that's near most of the companies from my field. Currently, I waste 2 hours a day going to work and coming back home and I'm pretty fed up already. 2 hours a day * 5 days a week * 4 weeks *12 months = 480 hours : 24 hours in a day = I waste 20 days a year in the bus. It's not funny.
     
  6. Corzhens

    Corzhens Senior Investor

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    That is the reason of one of my colleagues - proximity saves him a lot in terms of time, money and effort. Instead of buying a house and lot in the suburbs, he settled for an expensive condominium with an expensive monthly condo dues. He would walk his way to work and no need to suffer from the heavy traffic. However, a house and lot (with a garden and a neighborhood being a village) has many perks and advantages while a condo has cramped space, leaving nothing for pet lovers like me.
     
  7. gracer

    gracer Senior Investor

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    The distance of the property from where I am is a big factor me. My parents bought a farm land which was really far from our city, you'd have to travel around 3 hours from our city to get there. They have kept the land for almost a decade though, going back-and-forth during planting and harvesting time to check on how the crops that were being planted were doing. That was how they dealt with it until such a time when my mom noticed that the care taker they trusted to be taking care of the yields of the farm has been ripping her off. To cut the story short, they decided to sell the farm land and bought a land which is nearer our city but with a more expensive price. I think it's better though because we can easily access the lot due to its shorter distance away from our home.
     

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