House Hunting

I'm sure I've mentioned that Chris was transferred on here somewhere before. We sold our house and decided to move to the city where his new office will be.

The housing market in the city is crazy! Any market where you have to offer $50,000 MORE than the listed mls price for a house is crazy right? We had been looking at a house that was for sale privately. They had a price in mind and then had an assessment and that price went up a lot more than we had expected. The house was perfect for us, had a huge yard, in a nice neighborhood. Unfortunately their low and our high numbers didn't match.

Then the real search was on. We spent hours on the internet trying to keep on top of what was available. We met with an agent, drove around the city for hours and picked a house to put an offer on. In the market here, if you put the condition of an inspection on your offer, it automatically gets rejected. Crazy yes, but there are always 10 other offers with no inspection condition for the owners to choose from. We had to find a house that worked for us AND seemed relatively sound enough to forget about an inspection.

We put an offer on a house last Friday (not yesterday). We offered $50,000 more than asking (my house here didn't even cost as much as we over offered on that house....crazy). Then on the weekend we saw another house that was for sale privately. No one else was looking at it. It was almost a secret that we knew it might be for sale. It was great! Smaller than the other house, but much newer with a basement all ready for our own development ideas. Way smaller yard, but a much newer house in a very good neighborhood. We thought about it for about, um, a nano second and decided if the owner was willing to sell it for around the price he had originally mentioned we would be very, very, very happy to be the buyers. So we withdrew our offer on the other house. One, and possibly the only, nice thing about this market is you usually have some time to withdraw your offer. The house goes on the market, you give the buyers about 3 days to look and then all offers are presented at the same time on a certain day. We had until Monday at 10am to withdraw and we called our realtor at 9am to pull the plug on our offer. I'd love to know what that house ended up selling for, if we even would have had a chance with the offer we had put in.

Anyways, Chris met with the owner again this week, we settled on a price (we're getting an amazing deal....for this market), and we have a possession date. Now we just need to see the lawyer to draw up the contract and see the bank to finalize the financing and we have a house!!

Tomorrow we get to go back again, have another look, take some more pictures, do any measuring we might need to do, and get a good look at the backyard which we couldn't get a great look at last time because it was pouring with rain. Yay!

Pics are along the side of my blog if I haven't already made you look at them. There should be more added tomorrow.