CHESSNOID

It was about 7-8 years ago, my wife and I considered purchasing a condo in Long Beach at the Aqua Towers. We would have only enough for the down payment, and we would have been forced to get a toxic mortgage. At the time, they were called pick a payment loans. We actually applied and was approved for the $450,000 loan.

The real issue was getting a condo we liked. We wanted one that faced towards the beach and on a higher level. Unfortunately at the time, those would cost more than $100,000 above our loan amount so we passed on this condo. Of course, now we know that was a blessing in disguise.

The other consideration we passed on this condo is the units left available to us were facing the other towers. For us that was very undesirable. We felt that if we were going to commit to a big down payment and a huge loan that we should settle for something less than what we wanted.

I posted some pictures of what we would have wound up with in what I think our views would have been on the lower floor facing another tower.

Now, I get updates through redfin emails of all the areas that I had considered buying at and am amazed at all the collapsed prices of today. I posted the price transaction history of the units below so you can see what we were able to avoid.  I won’t put the actual unit even though this is public information.  The way I look at it  now is we avoided a $250,000+ loss.

Another condo we had considered was located in Pomona.  I blogged about it here in this post called Pomona Lofts for less than $100,000.  I guess this was another blessing in disguise for us.

If you are shopping for a condo or house to purchase, then I recommend using Redfin and its closed transactions history so you can figurre out what the comps are being sold for.  You don’t have to be at the mercy of real estate agents and you can save a lot of time doing your own research.  They didn’t have this available at the time I was looking at these missed purchases.  Who knows, maybe at the time I would have been caught up in the frenzy to get on the road to easy real estate riches?