Thursday, June 22, 2006

House hunting sucks (okay maybe it's just getting shot down that sucks)

The roller coaster continues.

Bid #4 went in today, a nice place in Shoreline. We thought we were going to be able to get our bid in 1st, no bid date, no bidding war. Originally, the agent and seller were going to meet tonight to go over our bid. That meeting was delayed until tomorrow. Now our agent calls and said the selling agent was mistaken, the seller is having an open house this Sunday and doesn't want to look at offers until Monday. Supposedly the selling agent inherited this listing from someone else and didn't get all the info. I thought this was going to be the one, but my guess is the seller realized people were interested in her house and wanted more than listing. That or the selling agent was just lying to our agent. Guess being selfish is what real estate is all about.

To recap:
We started looking just over a month ago 5/21/06.

1st bid * Ridgecrest
*we were not the highest bidder
*Lesson is we need to be willing to bid higher over listing.

2nd bid * Bitter Lake
*we were not the highest bidder, 47K over listing and we were maybe 3rd or 4th in line. It was a fixer!
*Lesson is don't go for anything near waterfront as someone rich will bid a heck of a lot more to tear the house down and build new

3rd bid * Maple Leaf
*We were the highest bidder but they didn't choose us because we had an inspection clause
*Lesson is go with the pre-inspection

4th bid * Echo Lake (no actual access or view on this one)
*we'll see what the lesson is on this one.

We could still get the Shoreline place I guess. We get a pre-inspection lined up and deal with that tomorrow or Saturday and resubmit our bid on Monday. But then we're likely dealing with a bidding war and we didn't want to go much above listing on this place.

Maybe we just need to slow down. We wanted to tackle this process aggressively and we've been busy with on-line listings, drive-by's, and walk-thru's. Though there's a lot of expensive crap on the market, there are a lot of really nice places.

I think I need to go for a run to release some of this pent up stress (in general)and annoyance (at the seller and her agent). Then I'll come back to deal with a tired Darren (who will hopefully be in a better mood), a kitchen full of dirty dishes and dinner.

1 comment:

tina said...

aww shoot,hang in there babe. I *sware* the right house will come at the right time. Just take it all in stride and make sure to laugh a lot! :-p