Home sweet home

I tell you once you get your hearts set on a house you fight to get it…
This time fighting paid off. We got our House but it has not been without many hoops and obstacles to overcome. I have 2 other posts on here describing some of them but let me tell you the rest of the story of us getting our home.
After the house went to foreclosure Bank of America bought back the house then gave it to Fannie Mae, I started to think that this might be nice because the majority of fannie mae homes we looked at were newly painted (one less thing I would have to do J ) and in some cases they replaced the carpets, the carpets in the house are not bad, they need a good deep cleaning though. So I thought, maybe that’s why we are going to have to wait even longer to get our home, because that’s they way life works right??? Not so much…
Our Agent had set up a search that tracked any changes on the address of the house we love, every hour of everyday so that when it did come back on the market we could know ASAP. Well it came up one Monday night while Seth and I were relaxing at home, I didn’t have my phone on me for a few hours and as soon as I looked it I saw the email “ Something has changed with 2288” I quickly clicked on it to see if it was true. It was, the price was still in our price range and we were super happy. We logged onto the computer and read the description and looked at the new photos to see if they had done anything else to the house, all they frantically calling and texting our agent. We didn’t want to risk not getting our offer in as soon as possible.
In reading the new listing we didn’t notice anything that said they were accepting offers for x amount of time, so we assumed it was the first good offer would be accepted…
While talking to our agent he said that we could get our offer in that night, but that he didn’t think anyone would jump as quickly and we would probably be okay sending over all the documents in the morning. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep so I instead that it get done that night. While our agent drew up the documents Seth and I ran to my parents house to use their printer / fax machine.
We got the documents and printed, signed and tried to fax them back, my parents fax machine was not working and kept faxing blank pages (yes I had the pages the correct way.) So we ran to Office Max and faxed them there.. I still can’t believe it cost $18.00 to fax 12 pages. Whew it was in and we should hear back in the next day or so on whether it was ours.
The next we found out that the listing agent had decided to accept all offers on the house until Friday at noon and then they would choose the Highest and Best offer, rather than doing what 99% of agents do and just accept the 1st acceptable offer. So again we got the lame agent who wants to complicate everything, I was so bummed! We had done everything right and yet still more hurdles to jump over.
We talked to our agent and he told us about what’s called an escalation clause, basically we say our offer it $1000 over the highest offer received. With that in place we felt good but scared that the price would go over what we really wanted to pay for the house.
On Thursday the listing agent came back and asked for Highest and Best offers from everyone, he asked us to resubmit our offer with our escalation clause with and up to amount, something like we will pay $1000 over highest offer up to XXX dollars. This became more scary in the fact that we has to name an up to amount, we didn’t want to go too high for fear it would drive up our price, yet not low either cause we wanted the house to be ours. We submitted our offer and was told that on Friday at noon the listing agent would choose the offer he would submit to the bank.
Mid morning Friday I got an email from our agent telling me that all offers are being submitted to the bank and they will choose what offer they are going to accept, so we weren’t looking to get an answer back until Monday or Tuesday the following week at the earliest.
Around 4pm, I was with Seth at a Chocolate Festival that ColdStone was participating in at South Towne Mall, it was noisy and I didn’t hear my phone. Something told me to look at it and I have a missed call, voice mail and a text from our agent saying CALL ME!
I quickly called our agent to see what was going on. WE GOT IT! Well that’s if we wanted to pay the higher price on the home… it was something that we weren’t sure we wanted to do and it was very stressful/ heartbreaking to deal with. On one hand we GOT IT! It was ours if we choose to accept the offer from the bank, no one else could get in the way and we should have a REAL approval letter early next week if we accepted. On the other hand, the price came back higher than we had thought we wanted to go, not much but a little, we worried if we could afford it (then again I worry about money crap all the time). We talked to our mortgage loan officer and asked a lot of questions and realized that it wasn’t that much different than when we thought we had it a few months ago. We knew this was the house we wanted, great location, and great house!
We called out agent and told him that we were pretty sure we wanted it but would let him know 100% Monday morning.
On Halloween we officially signed and accepted the banks offer. We are set to close on December 1st and move December 3rd.. We thought!