I Am Now a Homeowner
Hey there, Livejournal holdouts who still check these pages out. I'm still alive, really! The home search was a long and laborious process, which I will detail below, after a cut. We looked for a couple of months and probably 40 houses, with a few close calls before finally getting a great house in a great neighborhood. I will be moving in sometime in late June, after gradually moving a bunch of my stuff over there. Judy and Evelyn are currently planning on moving in in July 2011, after our wedding, which is scheduled for July 2, 2011.
We started our search online in February, looking at dozens of listings using a couple of different local websites. When we started floating the idea that we were looking for a realtor, people talk about realtors they know. And so we were faced with about 5-6 different choices for people who were "great". As we pondered the realtor question, we started driving around the area, checking out houses and the neighborhoods they were in. This let us cross a few neighborhoods off the list right off the bat. After deliberating on realtors, we ended up going with the mother of a fellow teacher.
This mother was very nice, but it didn't occur to me at the time that this colleague was bilingual and that his mom might not speak very good English. But she didn't. She was fine to communicate with over email, when she had the time to choose her words, but in person it was sometimes difficult to understand her and it cut down on the information she could give us as she walked us through various houses. We got started actually looking at houses over spring break in mid-March. We went out with this woman three times that week and checked out 16 different houses. One of them we really liked and wanted to make an offer on, but it had been contracted a couple of hours before we tried to do a second walk-through.
We did find another house in a good neighborhood that we loved a lot, though, and wanted to make an offer on that one. But there was a special mortgage (Fannie Mae Homepath) available on the house, and I wanted to know if the Homepath mortgage was better than the other type of mortgage I was looking at. Our realtor wanted us to make an offer, but I wanted to get those mortgage details. For a week, I bugged the realtor and my potential mortgage broker to find these answers for me. Finally they got the information and we made the offer on a Tuesday morning. But the delay cost us, because someone else had made an offer on Monday morning that they accepted right away. That was it for us and our first realtor. Communication was a big issue, and the communication issue basically lost us a house.
So we went to the next realtor on our list, Judy's first choice. She was the mother of Judy's friend's boyfriend, and was supposedly just awesome. Immediately she was easier to communicate with, but we quickly found out that she was quirky. First off, she wasn't a full-time realtor. What she does is sell houses in new neighborhoods for the builders and does regular real estate on the side. But she was very personable, and her husband worked restoring houses, so she sent him out with us several times because we looked at a lot of older houses. After a couple of times out with these guys we found a foreclosure (built in 2007) that was in pristine condition and available for a great price in a decent neighborhood. So we jumped at the chance and put in an offer right away.
That's when the problems started for this house. After putting in an offer on a Friday, the realtor called me on Sunday saying that the house's realtor was claiming that there were multiple offers on the house. Which changed our offer from a straight-up offer to what amounted to a silent auction- I went up $2,000 above the listing price to ensure that I got the house. And then we waited. In the listing, the foreclosure bank gave themselves a week to respond to any offer. And they took the entire week! Finally, the next Friday afternoon, my realtor calls to say they've accepted the offer. Hallelujah! All we need is the contract from them, which should come in on Monday or Tuesday at the latest. But of course, this didn't happen. Instead we waited and waited. Late on the next Friday night, my realtor called, to tell me that the foreclosure bank had accepted a better offer. Instead of just accepting our offer, what the foreclosure people ( http://www.treadstonerealty.com/ and http://www.primeauxteam.com/) did was essentially leave us dangling on their hook for two full weeks, holding out for a better offer.
That was a really, really shitty thing to do, but what made it worse was the First Time Homebuyer Tax Credit. This was a government tax credit of $8,000 to anyone who had a finished contract on a house by April 30. The message that Rossalyn Primeaux had accepted a better offer came at 9:30pm on April 23. This killed my enthusiasm for trying to get the tax credit, but our realtor insisted that we get back out there. So we headed out another 3-4 times in that final week, but couldn't quite find anything that we wanted to make an offer on. The date passed and we missed out on the tax credit.
But the Sunday after the deadline, we headed back out to look at four recent listings, and found the house! It is a 2,249 square foot house on an 11,900 square foot lot, with 4 bedrooms and 2.5 baths. It is in an older neighborhood with a pool, playground, and clubhouse, and is heavily wooded. Of all the subdivisions we went through while looking, this one was always our favorite. But the houses for sale were either too expensive or gone quickly. We jumped on this one, though, and made an offer before it had even been on the market for a week. After some wrangling, we settled on a price and I closed on it this past Thursday (May 27). So I am now a homeowner!
There are plenty of more things to talk about, but for now, this is the kicker of the story. On Friday, May 28, I went in to my apartment complex office to talk to the landlord about letting me out of the final month of my lease (it goes through July). She wouldn't even enter into a conversation with me about it. I said, "I was wondering if you'd be so kind as to consider letting me out of the final month of my lease." And she shook her head sadly and said, "No, sorry, there's no way we can change the dates in our computer, it red flags at corporate." While this may be true, her lack of willingness to even engage me on this makes me think she's very happy she has that "oh, corporate will frown on it" excuse to avoid ever having to discuss the issue with tenants.
We started our search online in February, looking at dozens of listings using a couple of different local websites. When we started floating the idea that we were looking for a realtor, people talk about realtors they know. And so we were faced with about 5-6 different choices for people who were "great". As we pondered the realtor question, we started driving around the area, checking out houses and the neighborhoods they were in. This let us cross a few neighborhoods off the list right off the bat. After deliberating on realtors, we ended up going with the mother of a fellow teacher.
This mother was very nice, but it didn't occur to me at the time that this colleague was bilingual and that his mom might not speak very good English. But she didn't. She was fine to communicate with over email, when she had the time to choose her words, but in person it was sometimes difficult to understand her and it cut down on the information she could give us as she walked us through various houses. We got started actually looking at houses over spring break in mid-March. We went out with this woman three times that week and checked out 16 different houses. One of them we really liked and wanted to make an offer on, but it had been contracted a couple of hours before we tried to do a second walk-through.
We did find another house in a good neighborhood that we loved a lot, though, and wanted to make an offer on that one. But there was a special mortgage (Fannie Mae Homepath) available on the house, and I wanted to know if the Homepath mortgage was better than the other type of mortgage I was looking at. Our realtor wanted us to make an offer, but I wanted to get those mortgage details. For a week, I bugged the realtor and my potential mortgage broker to find these answers for me. Finally they got the information and we made the offer on a Tuesday morning. But the delay cost us, because someone else had made an offer on Monday morning that they accepted right away. That was it for us and our first realtor. Communication was a big issue, and the communication issue basically lost us a house.
So we went to the next realtor on our list, Judy's first choice. She was the mother of Judy's friend's boyfriend, and was supposedly just awesome. Immediately she was easier to communicate with, but we quickly found out that she was quirky. First off, she wasn't a full-time realtor. What she does is sell houses in new neighborhoods for the builders and does regular real estate on the side. But she was very personable, and her husband worked restoring houses, so she sent him out with us several times because we looked at a lot of older houses. After a couple of times out with these guys we found a foreclosure (built in 2007) that was in pristine condition and available for a great price in a decent neighborhood. So we jumped at the chance and put in an offer right away.
That's when the problems started for this house. After putting in an offer on a Friday, the realtor called me on Sunday saying that the house's realtor was claiming that there were multiple offers on the house. Which changed our offer from a straight-up offer to what amounted to a silent auction- I went up $2,000 above the listing price to ensure that I got the house. And then we waited. In the listing, the foreclosure bank gave themselves a week to respond to any offer. And they took the entire week! Finally, the next Friday afternoon, my realtor calls to say they've accepted the offer. Hallelujah! All we need is the contract from them, which should come in on Monday or Tuesday at the latest. But of course, this didn't happen. Instead we waited and waited. Late on the next Friday night, my realtor called, to tell me that the foreclosure bank had accepted a better offer. Instead of just accepting our offer, what the foreclosure people ( http://www.treadstonerealty.com/ and http://www.primeauxteam.com/) did was essentially leave us dangling on their hook for two full weeks, holding out for a better offer.
That was a really, really shitty thing to do, but what made it worse was the First Time Homebuyer Tax Credit. This was a government tax credit of $8,000 to anyone who had a finished contract on a house by April 30. The message that Rossalyn Primeaux had accepted a better offer came at 9:30pm on April 23. This killed my enthusiasm for trying to get the tax credit, but our realtor insisted that we get back out there. So we headed out another 3-4 times in that final week, but couldn't quite find anything that we wanted to make an offer on. The date passed and we missed out on the tax credit.
But the Sunday after the deadline, we headed back out to look at four recent listings, and found the house! It is a 2,249 square foot house on an 11,900 square foot lot, with 4 bedrooms and 2.5 baths. It is in an older neighborhood with a pool, playground, and clubhouse, and is heavily wooded. Of all the subdivisions we went through while looking, this one was always our favorite. But the houses for sale were either too expensive or gone quickly. We jumped on this one, though, and made an offer before it had even been on the market for a week. After some wrangling, we settled on a price and I closed on it this past Thursday (May 27). So I am now a homeowner!
There are plenty of more things to talk about, but for now, this is the kicker of the story. On Friday, May 28, I went in to my apartment complex office to talk to the landlord about letting me out of the final month of my lease (it goes through July). She wouldn't even enter into a conversation with me about it. I said, "I was wondering if you'd be so kind as to consider letting me out of the final month of my lease." And she shook her head sadly and said, "No, sorry, there's no way we can change the dates in our computer, it red flags at corporate." While this may be true, her lack of willingness to even engage me on this makes me think she's very happy she has that "oh, corporate will frown on it" excuse to avoid ever having to discuss the issue with tenants.