Well, I bought another house today!  I wanted to be done buying houses so I could get back to focusing on multi-units again, but there are just so many deals to be had right now!  Yesterday we found out about a few homes that had come back to a builder. This builder was offering a great incentive to get them resold as soon as possible.  They’re taking $75k off and paying $6,500 toward closing costs.  After looking at comps, there appears to be about $50k to $65k in equity comfortably, with possibly more due to the great location of the lot.  It backs up to a huge grassy park with mature trees.  These are the very last of 600 homes that have gone in over the last two years.  The builder is also paying 10% commission to the Realtor, which is great for us because my husband has his license. 

The house is in Goodyear, AZ which is about 10 minutes west of the new Cardinals stadium and the highest dollar development project ever undertaken in Arizona and about 10 minutes east of Buckeye, which is projected to grow to two million people over the next fifteen years or so.  There’s also a big Westcor mall going in about three miles away from the house, with Harkins theatres and Dillards already on board as anchors.  And, there is a proposed spring training baseball facility possibly going in nearby as well.  There’s a lot positive going on, not the least of which is the widening of the freeway to four lanes + carpool lane each way.  After stop and go traffic today at 2:00 pm, I quickly realized I’ll be using side streets until that project is done.  We have mountain views from the back of the house.  These mountains are three miles away and its my favorite hiking spot that I have to drive much further to get to now.

We’ve decided we’ll move into the house.  That way we can get in with zero down and the commission we get back from the purchase will be enough to cover backyard landscaping, window treatments, paint, and mortgage payments for a year.  Since we have enough equity right away, we’ll re-fi into a better loan shortly after closing.

We’re just coming up on two years in our current house, and we were just getting comfortable.  But the plan is to move every two years for a while so intellectually we always knew this was the plan.  For each of our primary residences, we’re planning to live in them for two years then rent them out for three, then sell.  We’ll take the capital gains tax free since we lived there two out of the last five years each time.  Now I just need to psyche myself up to pack everything up and settle in once again!