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.

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E-mail to the real estate agent

As I’m sure you’re aware, we live in a slightly (to moderately) dodgy 2 bedroom apartment whilst we save money for a house deposit. Houses are expensive down under. Anyway, whenever something needs fixing, it takes ages and sometimes threatening emails (threatening to call emergency plumbers and so forth and then make the owners foot the bill, not threatening their person or anything like that. That’s not how I roll) to make anything happen. The door of one of the cupboards in the kitchen fell off when we first moved in, and that’s yet to be fixed. But that’s not really a must fix, so it doesn’t bother me too much. It’s just kind of annoying.

Let me just clarify: It’s not the real estate agent who manages the apartment that is the problem, she tells the owners whenever a problem arises (or so I’m led to believe), it’s the owners who just don’t bother to do anything. They prefer “fixing” things themselves and I don’t know, maybe they just can’t be bothered or something. Maybe I need a cattle prod. Then when they do come, they just show up. No phone call, no appointment. They just show up. Once they came when I was sick, hadn’t showered, and was laying around on the couch in nothing but my fuzzy pink bathrobe. Awesome. You can read about that here and here.

Why am I telling you this? Because we have another problem. Sigh. Our bedroom door won’t shut. And the tap in the bathroom doesn’t turn off properly. So I wrote the estate agent another email. Seriously, this is word for word, I copied and pasted this bad boy straight from my sent box (including the illustration):

Hi Taryn,

I know it’s hard to get the owners of the apartment to actually fix anything (please don’t forward this email to them…), but it’s been about a month since the last inspection where I showed what’s-her-name the problems of the apartment. And I haven’t heard a peep about when they will be fixed.

In case she didn’t tell you, the door to Aaron’s and my bedroom is broken. Well, not so much the door as the little thing that comes out of the side of the door to actually keep the door shut. I’m not sure what it’s called. Anyway, our bedroom door is missing this little thing because it decided that it did not want to retract when we turned the door handle to let us into our bedroom. We were locked out. I do quite like sleeping in my bed rather than the couch, so Aaron got out his tools and took the whole door handle off, along with the little thing that latches the door. He discovered that the little thing, let’s call it Bob to make things easier, was in fact broken.

So Aaron put the door handle back on, sans Bob, and now we can’t shut our door.

That may seem like no big deal, but we have 2 small children, one of whom thinks it’s absolutely essential to taste everything he comes across. And by taste, I mean shoves in his mouth. He also enjoys pulling everything possible off shelves King Kong style and making a giant mess. He’s cheeky, what can I say.

We have over 100 board games in our bedroom, so you can imagine the chaos that said child creates when he enters our room. Which is easy because the door won’t shut. Plus most of the games have tiny parts, which, as I pointed out, he enjoys putting in his mouth. He did once choke on a sticker and I had to call an ambulance, so I’m a little petrified of what may happen should he decide to attempt ingestion of board game pieces. Please see the attached illustration.

When he gets into the board games, he does that smile that is so big he has to close his eyes to accomodate his pudgy cheeks.

We have been pulling a big oil fin heater in front of the door to block Daniel from entering our room, but the cheeky monkey has recently discovered that he can make like a battering ram and force his way in. This is obviously quite a problem for us.

Furthermore, the cold tap in the bathroom is getting worse. I know the owners know about that one because one of them said he’d come back to fix it months ago, but you know how that goes….

Now when we go to turn it off, a little trickle keeps coming out. We have to turn it on full boar, then turn it off again whilst it makes noises resembling a dying whale. Sometimes it turns all the way off then, but other times we have to repeat the process up to 5 times. That could be just an annoyance, but Hannah has recently learned how to turn the tap on to wash her own hands. She can also open the door all by herself. So sometimes she goes in there, does her business, washes her hands, can’t turn the tap off because it’s crap, and then comes back out. I’m none the wiser that she’s even been in the bathroom and the tap is trickling water for hours before I notice.

Lucky for me I don’t pay the water bill…. And I’m not going to pay for excess water either. Not when the owners know about the crap tap.

Anyway, if you could maybe give the owners a little please-fix-stuff-in-the-apartment kick up the backside, that would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Sheri

We’ll see what sort of response this gets. I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: I only sent the email yesterday at nearly 5pm, and I’ve already received a response AND the owners called and arranged a time to come and fix stuff. Booyah. See, amusing emails are far better than mean ones. As Taryn wrote back “I always enjoy reading your emails, and now they come with illustrations too! Haha.” I’m glad she has a sense of humour because I can imagine that a lot of estate agents would find that sort of email obnoxious and get their noses all out of joint.

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Copyright 2012 Sheri Thomson