We originally looked at this house in July of 2009. It was was a pre-forclosure listed for $99K....which is amazingly cheap in this market. I ran out to look at it immediately and then Aaron and I both took another look the following weekend. We put in an offer on it for something like $90K and the seller accepted....and then we just needed her bank to approve it too being as it was a "short sale" situation. By the way, "short sale" does not refer to the amount of time it takes....it refers to being short on money. The seller owed money on her house and the bank didn't want to majorly lose out on this deal.
So...that was the first wait. I think that took about a month or so...it's hard to remember now. Finally we had an answer from the bank and a counter offer. They wanted $110K. We accepted that...but then it turns out that the seller was working with another part of the bank while we were waiting for the approval and managed to renegotiate her mortgage...and she didn't want to move out. Crap. We were screwed in this situation. All we could do was file our contract with the state and if she went to sell it again, she'd have to sell it to us.....BUT that would be null and void if the bank foreclosed on her in the end. Being as filing the contract would cost us upwards of $300 and was still not guarantee....we just started looking at other houses.
At that point, the first-time buyer tax credit worth $8000 was good through November 30th of '09 so we had a little bit more time to find another place. Pretty much, without the credit, we couldn't afford to break out lease and buy...so time was of the essence. Middle of September we found another foreclosure that was at the top of our price range that we put an offer on. It was turned down. I was pretty bummed because I thought this was the end of the line for us moving.
A few days after Dani's first birthday we got the news that the seller of the first house had missed her first renegotiated loan payment and wanted to know if we still wanted to buy. This was the end of September/beginning of November. We tried to rush to get things going because the deadline for the tax credit was looming....and eventually we gave up on getting the credit at all. We were moving ahead anyway because we were desperate to move. Thankfully, they ended up extending the credit till Spring anyway, so we felt like things were looking up.
Well....then came months and months of waiting. Nothing happened during the holidays because apparently bank employees just sit around with their thumbs up their asses for all of December. Ugh. About a month ago we FINALLY got the news....that they had turned our offer down. For some reason the $110 they wanted before wasn't enough....and they were now under the impression that this house was worth $170!!! BULLSHIT. If anyone has ever bothered to look at this place they would know it wasn't worth that. 1400sq. feet of nice and 1400sq. feet of shit are two entirely different things....so we reoffered, this time for $114K just so see what happened. Mind you, this house has had at least 4 or 5 assessments done....yet nobody seems to be able to figure out how much it's worth! We also looked at another house that was really nice...but tiny during this wait.
We arranged to look at the first house again because at this point we've all but forgotten what the place was like on the inside. The old owner is FINALLY out so we could really give it a good once over and take photos...although she left a lot of crap in it. Who knows if she'll be back for it or not. A few weeks went by and we didn't hear anything....so we just kinda pushed it aside.
Yesterday I drove by on the way to Amanda's. I thought to myself "I really need to look at some other houses....I'll get on that later". When I got to Amanda's she asked me at some point "so what's going on with the house?" and I shrugged. "Nothing. Unless you hear different, assume nothing is happening". An hour later I get a call that our offer was approved! WTF?!
So now? Well....I'm going to have an inspection done to see if we even want the place....and they're talking about us closing on April 1st. Holy shit! I'm not sure about it all yet...I really want to make sure it's livable first...plus we have to bang out things with our asshole landlord to see about breaking our lease...
And that's all I know so far.
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