[iandwk]

We are finally going to be real villagers! My wife and I took the lifestyle preview in Dec of '08. We rented a house in Bonita to celebrate her retirement in Aug and Sept last year. We've been homesick since then. We sold our house in May and have been renting since June 1st looking for the perfect house.

We decided that we preferred a home in the older section of TV. We were kind of starry-eyed about the houses that were for sale, but soon found out that buying in TV was no different than anywhere else. It's a business transaction and one needs to take the proper precautions to protect ones self.

Don't assume that just because it is owned by a villager that everything is great. We put a contract on a house in Mira Mesa and discovered through the building inspector that it needed a new roof. The owner refused to replace the roof, making the contract void. That was understandable and acceptable to us. But the owner also refused to sign a release so we could get back our earnest money. It took almost three weeks and two more roof inspections to get them to agree to do so. We are still waiting for the signed release and a refund. We also learned that you need to put down what you are comfortable with, not what the agent says. We naively assumed when our agent said $5000 would be a good amount that $5000 was the standard amount here in TV. Live and learn. It would have been less stressful to fight to get back $1000.

We learned that just because the contract states that the owner can refuse to make repairs, thereby giving you the right to void the contract, that the owner doesn't have to give you back the earnest money. It seems that they must sign a release, and if not it must go through mediation and/or arbitration, both of which cost money to both parties involved. Fortunately our case never got that far.

We learned that most real estate agent's advice is worth about what you paid for it. They will fight to keep a deal alive when it is not in your best interests. It's all about the commission. The good ones realize that if one deal falls through and they treat you correctly, you will stay with them until another is found. It's not easy to find the good ones.

We also learned that people don't necessarily take good care of their houses in TV. We saw some pretty poor houses. One good example was a house that had a walk-in tub. It looked pretty good, but when we looked in the bedroom adjacent to the bathroom, the electrical hookup was done by running a wire through the wall of the bathroom and along the wall of the bedroom, knocking a hole in the wall beneath the receptacle and hard wiring the romex cable into the receptacle, then amateurishly patching the hole with some mud. Two other houses we looked at had termite damage. Several others had work that was obviously done by the owners. I say obviously because the work was very poorly done, like the walk-in tub fiasco.

Let the buyer beware, as the saying goes.

We did find a great pre-owned home, but it was not as easy as we thought it would be. We will be living in Santiago on Figueroa St.

I can't tell my friends and family the address because I can't pronounce Figueroa.