Most important is to locate in a really good school district if you have or plan to have kids. With condos it's important to look out for solvency of the association future special assessments percentage of renters vs owners etc. with homes look out for fold zones as you will bed hit hard on the insurance. Also check for Chinese dry walls in condos built from 2005.
Get a mortgage broker used to working with foreign nationals and don't expect to get a mortgage at all or that sellers are willing to wait for it. Cash dominates the below 300k market.
[...] I am aware of the Chinese drywall issues and condo stability. I bought some condos in 2009/2010 where the HOAs were having exactly those sort of problems (paying cash obviously) and now the HOAs are sorted out and stable so the values have doubled. ...
Without wanting to hijack the intention and purpose of the thread, but I'd appreciate some input into what you both mentioned regarding the above highlighted points (perhaps I should open a new thread..).
-I assume HOA means home owners association...that is the group of owners of condos in one building or complex, right?
-What about solvency? What are "Future special assessments"?
-Did you mean "flood zones" rather than "fold zones" ... otherwise I have no idea what that means.
-I guess looking at the renters vs. owners ratio is something natural to do...from past experience in AUS, I can confirm that unfortunately a high proportion of renters in a complex or neighborhood increases the chances for nuisances of all kind.
-What about Chinese drywalls? Are we talking internal plasterboards? Or external, structural material of low quality?
EDIT: Just found out what the issue is: Toxic ([FONT=verdana, geneva, lucida, lucida grande, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]
sulfur at unacceptable levels) in cheap Chinese imported plasterboards...ohh, that reminds me of formaldehyde and asbestos containing building materials and whole generations of properties contaminated).
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-Re: School district ... it doesn't really matter for us, at all...unless we want to consider future sale prospects. We don't have kids and will never have any (it was not meant to be). But the school district thing brings me to my last question:
-Is it true that your ongoing costs for owning a property in the US is determined by what county and even what school district it is located in? I am still pretty much a newbie when it comes to these questions...I have only read somewhere that you even pay some taxes to your county and often even your school district, just for living inside those boundaries...apart from state taxes (if applicable) and federal taxes. When we were buying things in FL on our last trip, it was the first time we realized that VAT was different from one shop to another across the road...probably the border between the two areas. The bad thing was that the VAT was not even displayed on the shelf..so you never know the final price until you pay for it at the cashier. It didn't really bother us as we were only there on vacation but if you live there and want to compare deals, it can be pretty annoying.