Selling the House and Finding a New One

As you know we are selling our house. This is a hard decision because we love it, we love the area, we have solar power and every fruit you can think of and more. We have lots of cats we love and protect and everything we want (except a shorter drive to our activities and Jeff's work). We made the decision to sell and have started to look at houses. This is where the trouble begins... First off - selling. There are no MLS listings. That leaves a realtor (which in our experience looking for houses means do-it-yourself). There are clasificados and dubina.com and that is it. We opted for classifieds and we have a sign on the property gate also which only seems logical - you just can't see our house from the road. There are currently "housing incentives" in Puerto Rico but not all the incentives are applicable for everyone. For the buyer there are some legitimate benefits. They get no capital gains when they sell and some substantial money off of stamps etc amounting to several thousand dollars and if you’re lucky to get a loan some of the banks/gov give you $10,000 for a down payment(not sure how that works). Then there are the NON incentives like no property taxes for 5 years - right, here in PR if it is your only home you don't pay taxes anyway and if you own a little property (like us) that means a savings of $65 (yes, that is 5 years of property taxes), wuwu. For the seller there may be "incentives" as well - no capital gains (as if anyone has capital gains now), 50% off title transfer (why should you have to pay anyway when you pay off your house) and 50% of stamps for something or other. So we have been looking at some houses. This is no small feat. At most you can see 2 or 3 houses a day after calling and emailing and calling and on and on. There are no cooperative realtors who share house information. There is not awareness on their part of houses other than the handful that are "theirs." There are many houses for "sale by owner" but the people don't seem to really want to sell their homes because they can't give you directions or put a sign on it so you can find them. There don't seem to be realtors offices where realtors you know, have binders of listings and are available to people if they want to come in. If they have an office they don't go there unless you call and email and call and email. When you do get to see a house it is because you found their listing on clasificados and you call the owner and realtor several times and then have to meet them somewhere. You can't just do a drive by because you will never find the house for sale because there aren't numbers on houses, their aren't road names, and no one puts signs on their houses (if they do they are hand painted and faded after being there for years). When you finally do see a house it is usually a disappointment - "we told you we are 2 people who need a small house not sitting on the road with at least an acre and few neighbors." They show you what they have only no matter what you tell them. From the classifieds we can't narrow it down because most don't list the amount of land (which is usually 300 sq meteres - nothing). So this is a tedious, not-fun venture. The more houses we see the more we want to stay put! Jeff looked at a couple (I've looked at 7 or so) and Jeff said "if I only save 30 minutes or less on the drive each way I'd rather stay here." Our house is much nicer than other ones we've seen. Or you have a really nice house that is too big on no land. Or land that is crap. Or a crappy house in the Magotes which is a perfect place but doesn’t' have cell phone or internet (too many mountains). I have to say that this is very frustrating. Once you get it in your head you are going to move you kind of try to separate yourself from the wonderful things so it isn't hard to leave which makes it hard to stay. The "incentives" are around until June 30st unless they extend them. I don't know if they make a real difference to anyone other than the bank. The whole system is just plain messed up. It would work better to just swap houses with someone and leave the government out of it. The system is built to benefit the system only, a system that humans are not a part of.