The new house

Yesterday was the 28th of February.  The day our cooling off period ended, which basically means that since we didn’t reneg on our offer to buy the duplex, we are now under legal obligation to buy it, with full payment to be made by the 28th of March.

I am so excited.  The house is ours.  Er…will be, on the 28th of March, as long as the vendor (fancy real-estate speak for the current owner) doesn’t delay proceedings by two weeks as he can legally do.  We can too, but unless our loan takes that long to come through or something crazy like that, we certainly won’t be delaying things.

It’s also scary.  We’re going to have mortgage payments, and we’ll be responsible for fixing things even if they cost an arm and a leg, instead of just calling the real estate agent who sorts it out and doesn’t require any money from us to do so.  But scariest of all, do we really know what we’re getting in to?

We haven’t seen the house for 3 weeks. We saw numerous houses on the same days we saw the one we are buying, so they all kind of get mixed together in our minds.  I can’t even remember if there is a linen closet.  Or an ensuite. Or storage in the laundry room.  I don’t know what sort of storage is in the bedroom closets either. Maybe just a bar to hang the clothes on? Hopefully some drawers or something too?  That’s the problem with buying a house – if there are tenants living there, you are not allowed to violate their privacy and open up the closets or cupboards.

What if the neighbours are loud, obnoxious, all night partiers whose thumping music and loud profanities keep us up all night? Or what if they are just plain old crazy people who mow their lawn and throw the clippings over the fence into our yard, or steal our clothes off the line?  We’ve had a building inspection and a pest inspection, but we can’t really order a neighbour inspection (unfortunately).

I guess we’ll soon find out.  And in the meantime, we’ll be doing lots of packing.

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House hunting

It must have been so hard finding a house back in the day.  Grandma told me how she used to go out with a real estate agent every day for 3 months before she found her house.  What would people with little kids do? Or people who worked?

Lucky for me, there is now a little thing called the internet, aka teh interwebs.  I perused the real estate websites and waded my way through thousands of potential houses/townhouses/apartments/duplexes without having to actually go and see most of them to eliminate them from our shortlist.

We did go to a number of open houses over the last couple of weeks, only seeing the ones we’d thoroughly checked out and liked online, including google maps to see if we liked the area.  Some we didn’t actually get to go see because real estate agents all seem to like having open houses at 11am on Saturdays.

On Saturday, we saw a townhouse that we really liked.  It was spacious, had 3 toilets, a courtyard, and was close to Grandma’s house.  As soon as we got home, we made an offer.

The real estate agent called the owner and within an hour got back to us, saying “she really needs ____.” It was 5 grand more than we’d offered, but I said ok, we’ll offer ____.”  He said he’d call her back and get back to me.

The next day, he messaged me with “Hi Cheri (yes, he spelled my name wrong) Just heard from the owner they owe the bank $_____(15,000 more than our last offer) and need _____ for the bank to release the deeds.  Sorry guys, they are bound by the bank.”

Let me just point out that our original offer was $6,000 more than the “offers over _____” price.  If you actually must get $26,000 over the offers over price, then you should probably adjust your advertising.  To me, that is actually false advertising.  They didn’t need offers over $_____, they needed overs over _____+$26,000.  So how about advertising it for that price instead?

Needless to say, we told them that we were not prepared to offer that much.

We then got a message back saying “Hi Cheri, just spoke with the owner she is trying to negotiate with debtors to sell the property for $___ (our second offer) will possibly know tomorrow or Tuesday.”

In addition to knowing the price you actually need for your house, you should also speak to your bank and figure out your finances before advertising your house for sale.  Just a thought.

In the mean time, I kept eyeing the flyer of a duplex that we’d seen the same day.  The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be a better choice for us.

“What do you think about the duplex?” I asked Aaron “I think we should make an offer.”

We made our offer yesterday, someone else made a higher offer, we counter offered, they backed down, and the owner accepted our offer which was 5 grand more than what we offered for the townhouse. Or maybe there was no other bidder.  Maybe that was just a ploy to raise the price, but what if it wasn’t? Then we would have lost out.  It’s a tricky game this real estate business.

Last night we signed the papers and put down our holding deposit, and subject to our 10 day cooling off period and our getting our finance approved (which shouldn’t be a problem since we have pre-approval, but you never know), the place will be ours.  We’ve only been looking for 2 weeks.  Ok, that’s a lie, I’ve been perusing the real estate websites making lists of places I like for a while.  But we only started actually seeing the places 2 weeks ago.

Hopefully, we will be moving into our new house (new to us, but it is pre-loved) in six weeks.

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I also registered for all of my classes today, so not only will I be moving, writing my book, and turning 30 in the next few weeks, but now we’ll be moving too.  Good times.

If you enjoyed reading this, please vote for my blog. All you have to do is click the link below. That’s it… Clicking the link brings you to the Top Mommy Blogs home page. You don’t have to do anything else. Any clicks from my site to theirs is a vote.  THANKS!

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Copyright 2013 Sheri Thomson