Welcome to Front Porch LLC

1) You’ll probably lose the first place you bid on. When we were looking five years ago, we saw a beautiful wreck in the Stewart House for $290,000. We struggled to bid $275K, our upper limit — and someone came in and bid $290K, cash. The first lesson is, when you first start your search, you won’t know the finer points of market pricing and ugly experience will teach them to you. (That apartment was easily worth its asking price and we should have bid it.) The second lesson is, sometimes someone comes along with more money than you. Take heart from Front Porch’s First Law of Real Estate: “There’s always another apartment.” 2) Things take longer than you think they will. Expecting to close on the first date you’re given is almost always a sucker’s bet. There are a lot of reasons for this, including the difficulty of getting your attorney, the seller’s attorney, and the bank’s attorney in one room at the same time.
Because of this, chances are your rental lease will be up before you can move. Prepare for that possibility now, either by throwing your stuff in storage and couching it with friends, or by renting extra days from your landlord. Even though a friend of ours who just bought in Midwood got away with it, I would strongly advise against moving your furniture into a place before you’ve officially closed on it.

3) Even though we have computers, paperwork takes forever. You sent in your loan paperwork on Tuesday, why can’t they find it on Friday? Your boss knows they need that letter of recommendation for the co-op board package, why do you have to bug her about it? What do you mean, it takes a week to get copies of your old bank statements??
Give yourself 30 days to get a mortgage, and 45 days to get past a co-op board. That means start the applications immediately, because you’ll need the time to chase little pieces of paper around.

4) You get hit with weird extra last-minute costs. There are federal regs that mandate sending you a document called a Good Faith Estimate of closing costs — but other stuff always comes up. One stand-by is that any nice doorman building will ask you for a “move-in fee,” a $500 to $1,000 check to insure that your movers don’t damage their hallways. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

5) Something breaks the minute you move in. My first place had wall-to-wall carpet over a parquet floor — and savvy me, I’d pulled up the carpet to be sure the parquet was okay. Two days after I close, the floor guys come, pull up the carpet — and discover the floor tiles weren’t attached to each other. The parquet tiles all popped up and scattered like a deck of cards. The floor guys left, of course. It wasn’t their problem.
Just remember that though it’s your first place, and you want it to be perfect, it is a rule of the jungle that something will break, and whatever breaks will be fixable.