House Hunting: Our House...

...is a very, very, very fine house*.

The first fuzzy day at our house! 

This proves that Brian actually does get his way sometimes.

As some of you noticed in my last post, I spoke really highly of the house I preferred, although we ultimately put an offer on Brian's pick.  If we're being honest, I had doubts we would actually get this house and we agreed if we didn't, we would put an offer on my choice immediately.  That (obviously) didn't end up happening, and  we are both happily living in Brian's our top choice.  I still occasionally daydream about what the other house could have been, but I know we made the right choice.

Why did we choose to pursue this house over the other?  First off, my pick was under contract back when we first started looking at houses and had just become available again.  The Realtor told us the buyers backed out when they got the inspection back.  The Realtor claimed that there wasn't anything glaringly wrong with the inspection and that the wife was just having second thoughts and took the minor issue on the inspection as their way out of the sale.  While that may have been true, we weren't keen on spending a few hundred dollars and extra time on an inspection for a house that already had some issues (see previous post re: water damage in the basement).  And even though there are many (many) things in our house that aren't my particular style, the house in general looked well maintained and updated.

So, we got ready to make an offer.

We knew there would be lots of interest from investors in this property because the lot size is double the average in this area. There are so many examples in our neighborhood of investors buying up older homes, tearing them down and building monstrosities in their place (beautiful monstrosities, but monstrosities nonetheless).  Of course, an offer from an investor looks more appealing to a seller because it is for all cash without any contingencies.  Since we couldn't compete with that, we had to make ourselves stand out another way.

We wrote a letter.  We explained to the seller our backgrounds, why we wanted to live in the neighborhood, and how excited we were about the house.  We tried to emphasize our love of the house itself in hopes that the sellers didn't want to see their beloved home torn down.

I'd like to say that our letter was what sealed the deal for us, but we actually ended up being the only offer after another withdrew.  The sellers needed to stay in the house and rent back for an extra month which scared off investors and other buyers that wanted to move in immediately.  Coming from an apartment, we were able to go month-to-month on our lease while we patiently waited for the day we could finally move in!

Much like the previous house we put an offer on, we decided to go with an escalating offer.  Luckily, since we were the only offer, we didn't have to use the escalation part at all and ended up getting the house at list price with about a quarter of our closing costs paid for by the seller.

I still have a few topics on the logistics of the sale to discuss, but I'm going to skip it for now and get to the good stuff next week, the full house tour!


*Despite my long list of cons in the last post, I actually do like our house.  There is just an ever growing list of things I'd like to change the longer we live there and I can't help listing them out :)