Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes (2 page)

Once you have selected several potential neighborhoods, you should drive around to evaluate them, using this convenient …

Neighborhood Checklist

Note What the Residents Do with Cars That No Longer Function

—Good Neighborhood: They get rid of them.

—Bad Neighborhood: They keep them all forever, arranged tastefully on their lawns, as if expecting the Car Fairy to come one night and whisk all the cars away and leave everybody a nice shiny quarter.

Note What Kind of Names the Local Streets Have

—Good: Jasmine View Court Terrace

—Bad: Interstate 95

Note What Kind of Businesses Are Operating In the Neighborhood

—Good: Arthur A. Wutherington IV, Investment Banker

—Bad: Earl’s All-Night Nude Revue & Motorcycle Repair

Note What the Neighborhood Youths Are Doing

—Good: Selling lemonade

—Bad: Selling you your rear wheels back

Note What Kind of Bumper Stickers the Neighborhood Cars Have

—Good: “SCHOOL’S OPEN! DRIVE CAREFULLY!”

—Bad: “I
MY PIT BULL”

Note the Types of Neighborhood Social Activities

—Good: Barbecues

—Bad: Cockfights

It also might be a good idea to do some formal research into neighborhood property values by going down to the Municipal Building and getting shunted from one civil servant to another in an increasingly desperate attempt to find one who is not hostile, braindamaged, or eating lunch, until finally you open fire at random with a semiautomatic weapon. So we can see that this is not, after all, such a good idea, and it probably should not even be included here. Although frankly I doubt that any jury in the land would convict you.

It is possible to buy or sell a home without a broker, as will be discussed in a later chapter.
^*

But most people prefer to use a broker, because of the many advantages, such as:

1. If you have a real estate broker, you have an excuse to fend off the other brokers, who will otherwise follow you around and hurl rocks through your window with notes taped to them explaining the many advantages of using a broker.
   

2. Brokers always have nicer cars than you do, a phenomenon that will become more
   understandable when we get to the section on commissions.
   

This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive list of the advantages of using a broker. The only reason I’m not listing all the others here is that they don’t spring immediately to mind.

The best place to obtain a broker is at a junior high school, where you’ll find that virtually all the teachers obtained real estate licenses once they realized what a tragic mistake they had made, selecting a profession that requires them to spend entire days confined in small rooms with adolescent children. Often it is sufficient to just drive by the school and beep your horn; within seconds, brokers will come swarming out of doors and windows, eager to abandon their lesson plans on the Three Major Bones of the Inner Ear so they can help you find a home.

There are many factors to consider in selecting a broker, such as competence, honesty, vertical leap, and placement in the Evening Grown Competition. But the most important factor is an intangible quality
called “professionalism,” by which I mean “car size.” You want to select the broker with the largest possible car, because you’re going to spend far more time in this car than in whatever home you ultimately buy.

Next you should tell your broker what your Price Range is, so he or she can laugh until his or her official company blazer is soaked with drool. What your broker finds so amusing, of course, is that there is virtually nothing, outside of the Third World, available in your Price Range. I don’t care if your Price Range is a hillion jillion dollars, there will be nothing available in it. This is a fundamental principle of real estate.

At first you will probably insist on looking at the something in your Price Range anyway, which will result in the following comical dialogue:

This process is called “getting a feel for the market.” Once you’ve undergone it, your
broker will explain a creative new financial concept that has been developed to enable people such as yourself to enjoy the benefits of home ownership, called: Spending Way More Than You Can Afford. Usually you have to talk yourself into going with this concept. Here are some sound financial arguments you can use:

1. Although you may not really be able to afford a more expensive home at your current income level, it makes sense to buy it anyway, because in just a few years, at your current rate of progress in your career, you’ll probably be dead.
   

2. There are major tax benefits to owning a home. The law, written by wise lawyers and bankers, permits you to deduct all the money you give to lawyers or bankers, which will turn out to be virtually all the money you have.
   

3. Owning a home is a smart investment. As inflation pushes up the cost of living, you will build up equity
   ¹
   in your home, so
   that, when you eventually sell it, you will have made enough profit to be able to afford to pay the points
   ²
   and closing costs
   ³
   on your next home!
   

So as you can see, you really can’t afford not to buy a home that you really can’t afford. It’s time to sit down with your broker and take a serious look at the listings.

The listings are computerized lists, or “listings,” of all the houses that all the brokers in your region have been trying to sell since the Carter administration. Listings are always written in a special real estate code. For example, this listing: CHARMING
¹
RANCH
²
—4BR
³
3B
⁴
2TD,
⁵
fully landscaped,
⁶
newly renovated.
⁷
…can be decoded as follows:

1. Rooms the size of nasal spray cartons
   

2. IN URBAN AREAS: No attic or basement. IN RURAL AREAS: Also cattle have wintered in the foyer.
   

3. Four bedrooms
   

4. Three bathrooms
   

5. Two turtle doves
   

6. Extensive comical lawn statuary including minority groups holding lanterns; also large, permanent, fully mechanized, spectacularly illuminated display of Santa’s Workshop
   

7. The walls have been pretty well scraped clean in the room where the demonic beings from another dimension came through the TV set and caused the previous occupants’ heads to explode.
   

Study the listings carefully and make a note of any houses that look right for you, so your broker can confirm that they were all sold just that morning. This is actually good, because it will help to get you into the proper highly desperate frame of mind where you will do almost anything to get a house, including paying large sums of money you really don’t have to people you really don’t know for reasons you really aren’t sure of. Which is the essence of real estate.

Okay. Now we have reached the most exciting part, the very essence of home buying: actually going inside specific houses so we can examine them and fail to notice major defects.

One important warning before you get started: You want to be on the alert for the Helpful Seller. This is the kind of seller who, the instant you enter his home, leaps out and attaches himself to you, like an intestinal parasite, only worse, because intestinal parasites, for all their flaws, do not feel a great need to point out every single one of their home’s numerous features, whereas the Helpful Seller does.