Seeking to Understand

As usual life went from being complicated to going insane.

When Melody didn’t get accepted by any schools, it threw our future plans into a state of flux. Even so, we figured we had a few months to work something out. So after some discussion, we decided to look for a house back home. We figured we had time, so we weren’t pushing things too hard.

Then an email arrived from the university reminding us that we were to vacate our apartment by May 7th. This email appeared about a week ago rather out of the blue. Panic ensued.

We had already had a plan to see around eight to ten houses with the realtor on Saturday (including a re-visit of a couple we had seen before), but suddenly there was a much greater sense of desperation about the process. Our priority had shifted. We had thought we had the whole summer to work out the details and take things slow. Now it felt like we had no choice but to make a decision on Saturday and get the ball rolling. Our realtor confirmed those suspicions and somewhat firmly suggested that if we planned to have a place to live by the time our lease was up, we’d have to make an offer within a few hours.

When we reached the second property on the tour, we pretty much had made our choice. It was a house we hadn’t seen before and had only been listed a day or so prior. There had been no pictures on the listing the realtor sent us, but we had decided that something about it sounded nice. (Which is odd because the description text was like, 2 sentences.) Curiously enough, when we emailed the realtor back with our request to add that house to the tour, she had already put it on there for us since she thought we might like it.

And like it we did. It immediately became the benchmark for all the other houses to be compared against. It’s not the biggest, fanciest, newest, oldest, most modern, least modern, or endowed with the largest lot, but I guess it had something that day that really sucked us in. It had what I guess can only be described as character.

We had one more house to visit when we decided to just cut the tour short and head back to the office and make an offer on house #2. And so we did.

Our offer was set to expire at 12:30pm on Sunday - not even a full 24 hours after the offer was made. Our realtor knew we needed to hurry and she likes to move fast to keep things from sitting in limbo for long periods driving both seller and buyer crazy with anticipation. After we left her office she packed up all the papers and went in search of the realtor who listed the house. A few hours later we got a call - she hadn’t been able to contact the other realtor by any means. It would have to wait until the morning.

It was hard to sleep last night. It was so exciting… our bid was quite a bit less than asking price and we had also added a couple requirements for the seller. On top of that, our offer timeframe was super short. How would all these factors affect the seller? Would they just ignore it and let it expire? What was going to happen?

About an hour before the deadline was to expire, our realtor called and told us she had got everything lined up and a meeting was going to take place soon between the listing agent and the sellers and they’d discuss the offer.

The time passed slowly for us…

Eventually we got a surprised call from our realtor - they had accepted the offer! The sellers didn’t even bother to make a counter-offer - they just accepted it as-is! And just like that we have begun the path towards home-owner(debtor?)ship!

If everything goes according to plan, we’ll be closing on May 4th - just in time.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 12:08 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.