gaobest

Enjoy the wedding. The house will work itself out. The wedding memories (pre during post) will be way more fun. I still love my wedding memories and photos - some of my wedding guests are now not living so seeing photos of them and thinking of our times together during our wedding is super special. I barely think or worry about those who couldn’t attend - I’m just grateful for everyone who was there.

wakesetter93

We're definitely looking forward to the actual day, not so much the chaos leading up to it. I did just finish booking the transportation to/from the church/reception so that's off the list.

I'm really looking forward to the honeymoon!

wakesetter93

Looks like we're headed back to Austin in 2 weeks to meet with our realtor and a builder. Starting to consider going the new build route as investors currently aren't allowed to purchase new builds in Austin, so the bidding war is reduced. It's also Spring Break for Texas and South by Southwest that weekend so hopefully everyone will be gone/passed out drunk and not trying to buy a house.

jtav559

Enjoying the House Hunt / TR.

I can certainly feel your pain on the multi-offer + WELL above asking price game. My wife and I went thru the rigamarole of shopping in the greater Los Angeles market and were shocked at some of the sales stories.
My favorite, and it seems you ran into one too: house went live and within 24 hours had 39 offers and the winner was $85K above asking price / was under contract before the 48 hour mark. How does one even compete with that craziness?!?

It took us a few attempts, but we finally found one that worked for us. I am sure you will too!!!!

Ps, Gumbo is a proper gentleman with his bandana.

wakesetter93

Well I'm glad somebody is enjoying it, because we certainly aren't!

I can't believe there are enough people out here to keep the prices so elevated for so long. Since my last post I've talked to my realtor twice and she drove over to the builder because they weren't answering the phone (she was in the area) and they told her that we could get on the waitlist and they would probably be able to get us under contract in July and the house could be done 12-16 months after that. It's absolute madness!

Gumbo has two modes, proper gentelman and total a-hole. I got him on a good day

drminn

Is Texas going socialist or what? ;-)

wakesetter93

Ha, it's more the fact that you have to get on a waitlist, wait 3-4 months, go under contract on the house and then wait 12-16 months to get your house built. Many builders are requiring owner-occupancy in Austin proper. Can't speak for the suburbs.

dat4life

I went to West for the first time 13 years ago on an assignment as an intern. Never in my wild dreams did I think i would see it on FT

wakesetter93

What kind of work sent you to West? The Czech Stop certainly doesn't need any business help!

dat4life

I work in audit.

wakesetter93

That makes sense then. Not sure what companies or divisions are big enough there to warrant an audit, but when my fiance was in IT audit she did have to go to some obscure places.

dat4life

Hahaha for sure. I have my fair share of great business trips, but much of my work travel takes (or more accurately took) me to little spits of towns around Texas (West, Brownwood, Cransfill Gap, Bloomburg, Mount Pleasant, etc. Actually... after looking at that list, working from home permanently doesn't sound so bad anymore

Also, it's pretty funny we're having this conversation across two threads haha. 3M is a consideration for sure! Just don't expect me to even try to run a sub 2 hour time haha. At the rate I'm going, sub 3 is an accomplishment.

wakesetter93

The most obscure places I had to go were Tulsa, San Antonio, and Abilene. Guess I should count my blessings!

Assuming we are actually able to find a house maybe we can have an Austin meet-up the weekend of the race, I have a few friends that run it every year.

wakesetter93

With our wedding fast approaching, my fiancé and I are back down in Austin for one last hail Mary house hunt before our focus switches solely to wedding planning. Due to commitments in Dallas on Saturday we had to cram as much as possible into this trip, so we’re off on a whirlwind 24 hours in Austin to try and find a new house!

We left our house in Dallas just after 4:15 and started the drive up to North Dallas to drop off Gumbo. As some of you may know from previous trip reports, my fiancé’s parents are kind enough to watch the dog while we are out of town, but they are jetting off to Hawaii to celebrate Spring Break with her younger brother who is still in school. While we thought we were going to have to board him, we had a friend offer to watch him last minute as she is looking at getting a dog soon. After fighting the traffic up to North Dallas, dropping the dog off and getting him situated, we started our trip in the thick of 5:00 traffic. The traffic was worse than I had ever seen and, when we passed the exit for our house heading southbound it was 5:20pm, when we left the Dallas city limits and entered the suburb of Red Oak it was 6:20pm, meaning it took us over an hour just to cross town.

“Find me a yard with squirrels please” -Gumbo

Traffic stayed fairly heavy south of town and for the duration of our drive. We made a quick pit stop for dinner at the Chick-fil-A in Waco before continuing to our hotel in Austin. Just outside of Georgetown we hit another snag as the entire southbound section of I-35 was closed due to a tractor trailer fire and we were diverted onto the side road. We finally arrived in Austin just before 10:00pm which meant our 3-3.5-hour drive ended up taking around 5 hours.




The reason for this quick trip was the fact that, based on her prior experience, our realtor told us that they typically have a lull in the market over spring break with many local families leaving town. Spring Break also coincides with South by Southwest (SXSW) which is a massive festival in Downtown Austin which kicked off this weekend. Therefore, many potential homebuyers opt to take house hunting trips another weekend.

Because of the influx of folks for SXSW driving up hotel prices, and our last-minute decision, I booked us a room at the cheapest Marriott property I could find. We booked a room at the Fairfield Inn and Suites – University Area for $107/night on the AAA rate and upon arrival were informed that they were almost completely full and that no upgrades were available. At the time of booking, they only had rooms with 2 doubles and a king suite left. We opted to play upgrade roulette and when it didn’t materialize, we made do with our two doubles. I think my fiancé was secretly happy she wouldn’t have to fight me for covers for a night. Upon checking into our room, we found that the deadbolt lock wasn’t operational and after discussing with the night manager she offered me 5,000 points for our inconvenience. She also offered to move us to another room, but we had already started to unpack, and the room had a working latch lock. The fact that we were only staying for one night also helped with our decision.

The hotel was on the lower end of average and was clearly in need of a renovation. Everything during our stay was adequate but many of the surfaces/fixtures were well worn. This was somewhat surprising given the fact that this is advertised as being close to the University of Texas, but I figure that may mean they have a captive audience. After dropping our bags and dealing with the door lock issue, we headed across the street to Plucker’s for a beer and dessert. After all, it had been a very long drive. From there, it was back to the room to get some sleep before a long day of house hunting.

Fairfield Inn & Suites Austin-University

Lobby/Breakfast Area

Market

Two Double Guest Room


Prepping for a long, stressful day tomorrow


I’m not sure if it was anxiety, excitement, or just being uncomfortable from the double bed but I found myself wide awake around 6:00am. I tried to go back to sleep but ended up just heading down for “breakfast” around 7:30. The hotel offers free breakfast, but it is still in a ‘Grab and Go’ setup and they only had some cereal, fruit, breakfast bars, yoghurt and microwave breakfast burritos and sandwiches. Overall, the breakfast was ‘meh’ but as someone who doesn’t really eat breakfast, the bowl of cereal and cup of coffee I had were fine. After taking some breakfast up to my sleeping fiancé, we packed up and checked out of the hotel around 9:45 and headed off to see our first house. The weather was cold and gray and would only get colder and windier as the day went on.

“Breakfast”

The first house wasn’t available for showings until the day after, so we did a drive by and checked out the neighborhood. We weren’t thrilled with what we saw and had some time to kill before our first appointment, so we stopped at a local coffeeshop nearby. The first appointment was a small neighborhood full of new builds in Northeast Austin near 183 and 290. Unfortunately, the timeline on completion of their inventory wouldn’t align with ours so we moved to South Austin for the remainder of our day. First up was an existing home in a well-established neighborhood that had a massive backyard for Gumbo and garage space for my toys. Though, as with all existing homes we knew that we would be in a bidding war. From there, we swung by another local coffee shop, this one owned by one of our realtor’s friends who also happened to be an alumnus of the same school as me. After chatting with her for a while we took our coffee and headed back out into the cold to check out some new builds in two master planned communities. While they didn’t offer the charm of the existing home, not having to get not a bidding war and being able to contract immediately was appealing.

House #1

Neighborhood Coffee Shop

Model in NE Austin


South Austin

“That’s what I’m talking about” -Gumbo

The Hive

Another Model

We finished up with our last appointment around 2:30 and stopped back at The Hive for a late lunch and discussed the properties we saw. Around 4:00 we got on the road home to try and beat the worst of the Austin traffic heading out of town the Friday before spring break. Also trying to time our arrival in Waco after the bulk of the 5:00 traffic subsided. We spent the whole ride conversing about the various options with our families, lender, realtor, and each other with a stop at Buc-ee's thrown in for good measure. Some of you may have seen this in another one of my trip reports but Buc-ee's is a chain of gas stations that are the worlds largest. The inside is the size of a grocery store and the exterior has 250+ fuel pumps. After arriving safely back in Dallas and picking up Gumbo from a friend’s place we put in our 5th offer in our house hunting saga. Now, we wait!



Yes, that is pump #252


Hope you all enjoyed following along on yet another installment of our house hunt in Austin!

lamphs

Thanks for keeping us all updated! I always enjoy the detail you put forth in your reports!