PA housing market?

[luvbunnies42]

I was wondering if anyone else from PA see's how bad the market is and has any tips for first time buyers.We are limited to what we can work with and have no outside help.Most the really nice houses are overly high priced at the moment.We've looked at several others but they all seem to need so much work or be in a bad area. Does anyone know another place to start or how we could get a house.

We've had horrible luck. When we do find something and it's our price range people have bought the house site unseen.We had one sell out right from underneath us the first day it was on the market.We were on the phone with our realitor first thing that morning and were making a time to look at it.At the same time it went under contract.We've had similiar situations with at least 4 houses.It's stagnet in our price range though. Any advice for me then what's already listed.We've even looked at foreclosed homes.Which I posted another topic about.All of them needed way to much work and needed more money then we can throw into them .

[Rabscuttle]

I am not from PA, but my wife is (New Castle).. We looked a while back at properties in PA, and found that western PA seemed to have some good deals outside the cities on historic properties. have you thought of looking into one like that ? (something that may be found on historicproperties.com?)

[luvbunnies42]

The only problem with historic property is that they have so many rules. What I mean is not being able to build, add a garage and there's so many things you can't always do with the property. My dad lives in Middletown and they have some historic property and they don't have all those stipulations but taxes are like double charged. They have a wall all along that road that was built by slaves, the only 2 cork Elm Trees in that part of PA in the yard and the house was George Washington's summer house and General Meads headquaters at one point in time.But, we looked at property and a house in another town and we were talking about adding a carport and eventually expanding if we ever bought it and were told we couldn't and we may have to get it approved by some historic society.If they didn't have all these rules on all of them I'd gladly look.I still might anyways.Thanks.

[Rabscuttle]

I do remember that some of the "rules" could be maddening - though the Histerical Societies don't tage every old building as historical... We also looking in virginia (east chesepeke bay) and the town there was heavily subsidizing the buying and renovating of the homes - and it was haing a stunning effect on the town, the homes and the property values... It could be something to keep in mind (we always looks in historicalproperties.com - I think that is the website)

[EugenS]

historicalproperties.com doesn't work. I was pretty interested in the site. Anyone got any other sites I could look at?