Finally made an offer on my first condo. Done wasting time and money waiting for rates to improve.

I just took the plunge and made my first purchase offer. After years of limbo, of futilely waiting for the RE market to improve, I've finally advanced past the house-hunting step in my homebuying journey.

It's a nice 140k condo situated in a quiet neighborhood in downstate Wisconsin, specifically within Waukesha County. Affordable and livable homes don't come around often in my income bracket (53k a year), so I acted fast and made my offer just a day after it was listed.

My realtor and I are just waiting to hear back from the seller's agent, but I'm confident we'll consummate this condo. I made the very first offer at 144k (4k over the asking price), with an escalation clause up to 150k. Barring the off-chance that someone outbids that, I'll have to add house-keys to my ring sometime this summer.

It's the worst time to buy a house, they say, and they're not necessarily wrong. But someone should add the worst time so far qualifier. House prices continue to rise at a historical rate with no end to the trend in sight. I quit house-hunting once the market got bad, and predictably enough I regretted not buying one before it got even worse.

Better late than never. Sure, it's probably no longer realistic to buy condos like this for just five figures (this was listed at 84k back in 2020, for point of reference), but it's definitely not too late to profitably invest in homes. The cold, hard truth is housing prices—as astronomical as they currently are—aren't nosediving barring another crisis like the 2008 crash (in which case, we'd have even bigger problems than housing costs). Maybe mortgage rates will drop soon (a big "maybe" coming from an RE layman like me), but I'll at least be able to refinance if so.

We all agree the best time to buy a house was sometime in the past, but I say the next-best time is now. If you have the income, savings, the risk appetite for RE investments, and a lovable home for sale, I don't think there's any better time than the present.

UPDATE 07/01/2024: My offer is accepted! The final cost escalated to 147k due to competing offers, but I'll gladly take that compared to most other prices available for condos and neighborhoods of these calibers.