Finding Our New House

Candy and I have been dreaming of having our own house for quite a while now. Actually, it was Candy who brought me into this dream. We give up many things to live the lifestyle that we do. To travel as much as we do, the thoughts of owning a house have been out of reach in the past. I know many people are envious of our lifestyle, but well knowing that it's just not possible with a mortgage and kids. We have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy it, we hope. We want to own a home, but don't want to do it at a cost of our complete lifestyle. We realize that we will have to cut down on the travel, but we don't want to be owned by our mortgage.

Although we weren't in the financial position to buy, we would go out on our days or afternoons off and look at houses. It's a totally different market out here, and we set the goal to look at 100 houses before we bought. Because we don't have a tone of money, we knew that we wouldn't be buying a new house, at least that wasn't likely. So, we needed to spend time in the older houses, getting to know where the problems generally occurred. We wanted to see how people renovated them, what worked, what didn't, and generally, just get smarter about housing in Taiwan. Also, for me, I really needed to get used to this new style of building. I've got a pretty good idea of what to look for in Western houses, but here, everything is made of steel and concrete, and tile. So, we tackled it head on.

There's a place up behind where we are living now that we have continued to go back and look at as units come available. It's called Feng Huang Chen, or Phoenix City. It's only 1 km away from where we are now, and the more we look around, the more we like the area that we are in. There's an elementary school and a Jr. High school, a brand new hospital, a large community center with swimming pool, tennis, basketball, and badminton courts, a large outdoor track, a morning and evening market, and 2 minutes away is the Zhong He Interchange to the #3 highway. Plus, with the new hospital they have built expressways in and out of Taipei City, so it only takes about 10-15 minutes to get to downtown. These places on the hill have always caught our eye, because of the spectacular view that some of them hold.

In Taiwan, a view isn't even a real consideration. With the high density of the population out here, most places are built on alley ranging from 4-8 meters wide. That's the spacious side. On the back side, sometimes the buildings get so close that they literally almost touch. It's common to find an apartment where the back windows get no natural light what so ever. I had come to accept that this is a part of life out here that I would have to come to grips with. Candy knew that this was hard for me, and I just asked of her that we be able to see at least a tree out of 1 of the windows in the house. View hasn't really had value out here in the past either. It seems that every good view in Taiwan is reserved for the dead people. Due to Feng Shui, you want to leave your ancestors with the best view. Plus, because Taipei is situated in a basin, pretty much any view place will be well out of the city and thus, very inconvenient.

We had gone to check out this apartment about 3 months earlier with a real estate agent. The price at the time was $6.8 million (about $250,000 Can), which was way out of our budget. We loved it, but kept on looking around. Then, just recently, Candy found another house in the same community for private sale. We went up to look at it, and had a strange sense of dejavu. After a while we realized that it was the same one. With the market doing what it has been, and the interest rates falling to an amazing level, we have been more serious about the possibility of buying. I'm skeptical about where the market is going and how far down it will go, so I told Candy that I'm open to the possibilities of buying, but only if it's a sweet deal, and I mean sweet. We figured out what would be our highest amount we would spend on the place, and decided to just go and throw our number in and see if the owner would even be interested in talking with us. He was.

The middle man told us that he wouldn't even take our offer of $5.2 to the owner, and that we would really need to bring it up. We did, up to $5.4($200k Can), but told him that this really left us basically no room to move with our budget. We thought there was no way. The next day, we found out the owner, Ser Chen, wanted to meet up with us in McDonalds on Wednesday after work. We met with him and he explained that he had brought his price down to $6 million and that was pretty much all he could do. Luckily, he spoke English, so I was able to talk with him clearly. Negotiating a house sale in Chinese is a skill that I'm not quite ready for, yet. At that point, I just told him that we didn't want to waste his time or insult him, that we really didn't have that kind of money, or really much more than what we had offered. I said that we would leave him our number, and that with these increasingly difficult financial times, that if somewhere in the future our offer seemed better to him, that he could call us and we could talk then. He went of to talk to his middle man, a neighbor of his who takes a commission on the sale, and came back.

Then the dance began. He hummed and hawed and came down to $5.8. I punched numbers into the calculator and went up to $5.44. He talked with his wife and the middle man for a long time and finally came back with his bottom price of $5.6. I went up to $5.48 and gave a disappointing look to Candy and explained that furniture for the house would have to wait because we were already over the budget. He wanted more but I said I just didn't have it. We finally met at $5.5 million

So, now we have given him roughly 9% of the sale value as a down payment, and all the paperwork is into the bank to see if we can even get the money that we need. We are ready and willing to walk away from the house if we need to, and are really trying not to get attached to it, should that be the case. But, the reality of it is that every time we go up the mountain and look closer at the place, the more we can see ourselves in there for a long time. It's great going shopping for furniture now, cause it's not about maybe one day that will fit into our house, but will this actually fit nicely into our house? We just hope that the banks will lend us what we need, or this is all for nothing.

The apartment is on the fifth floor of five floors. It's about 10 years old and around 950 square feet plus balcony. The living room has large windows that look over all of Taipei city, from Taipei 101 across YangMing Mountain, over to Danshui, and back out towards TaoYuan. It's got 3 bedrooms and fantastic light (such a change from the dungeonesque light that we have in our place now). My favorite part is that up on the roof, we have about 850 square feet of roof top garden that goes along with our place, with the same amazing view. The community is great, a lot more artists and such, it seems. There's a pool and community center for those who want to sing Karaoke, and a basketball court. Also, it has a kids playground with massive dinosaurs (seriously, about 30 feet tall) that they can play on. It's a gated community, with guards at all the entrances. Our place also comes with a parking spot, which will cost us about $25K Can! Behind the community are mountain trails that I have run and ridden before. They go all over into the wilderness for many miles.

So, there's the lowdown for you all on what is happening with the house. You wanted to know, and now, one novel later, you do. Send us prayers that we will get this if we are meant to.