We're Moving!!

My parents sold the house I grew up in a few years ago. To make a long story short the new owners immediately had buyers remorse and never even moved into the home (money pit for them) and because of their buyer’s remorse hate my parents. They have listed it for short sale a few times with no bites. Jacob and I recently figured now was the time to buy a bigger house for our growing family, so we looked at the Riata house. Jacob instantly fell in love with it. However, I loved the house I just didn’t see it as OUR house. Since I was not 100% on board Jacob humored me and we checked homes at the auction and on the MLS. We looked at 100’s of homes went into dozens of homes and could not find something that we both loved and thought would work for our needs. One day after looking at some homes, we were driving by the Riata house, and I said, “Let’s walk through the home again and talk about it like we do these other homes. Jacob liked the idea so he pulled into the neighborhood. This time when we walked through the house, WE LOVED IT!! We were so excited and really felt like it was the “perfect” home for us.

Since Jacob works in the auctions everyday, he had a good idea how to figure out the banks true value of the home. Meaning the bank was probably willing to sell the home for less than it’s true value. The home is bigger than most of the homes in the subdivision, so it is a difficult home to pull comps on. So we were banking on the fact that the bank had no idea that it was actually worth more than the comps. We both decided to make a VERY low offer and just see what the bank came back with, that way we would have a good idea the kind of money we would need. The house was listed at $599,000 and we offered $350,000 on July 3rd.

The realtor listing the property was initially upset about the offer but Jacob explained to him the recent bank owned and short sales in the neighborhood and why we had offered such a low offer. He also told him this was just a starting point we were very interested, but we really wanted to get an idea what the bank was thinking.. Once Roger (the listing agent) heard all this from Jacob he had the Harmon’s (the sellers) look at the offer. They signed it and we sent the offer to the bank. We waited for what seemed like forever, wondering if the bank would pull comps like us or since the current owners owed over $950,000 they would try to get more from us. At the end of August, we finally heard back from the bank with a counter offer at $405,000. Jacob and I were willing to pay up to 450K for the home SO OF COURSE, WE WERE ECSTATIC. We were in escrow with our dream house for what we thought was a great price.

Things to Remember….
I wanted to tell everyone right away that we were moving, however, Jacob working in real estate always says, “Stacy, it’s never a sure thing until it closes.” He sees how quickly a deal can go sour, so he didn’t want to tell anyone we were moving. I convinced him we should tell people because we needed to give our ward and neighbors a heads up that we were moving. We decided that it was a good idea to tell everyone around September 15th.
How excited we were finally hear back from the bank and such an amazing number. Jacob and I couldn’t believe it. We had prayed so long and so hard about this house we knew our prayers has been answered and this is the house we were to live in.