House Hunting Odyssey

I've made most of the arrangements necessary for our move and the packing is on track.  We're moving on 11/28 - the day after Thanksgiving.  Luckily, some good friends in town have invited us for a quick Thanksgiving dinner and we won't have to do more than bring a store-bought pie.  We'll probably be painting that morning and packing more boxes that night. 

Aside from being Sam's mom, house hunting has been my dominant activity for the past few months.  It's been so frustrating not to be able to write about it, but we had to break our lease and so didn't want to go public.  Our landlords here have treated us so well and we're working closely with them to re-rent their home.  It was a risk to rent a townhouse privately, but it worked out better than we could have hoped.  Thanks J and L!

Our house hunting adventure started with exploring a huge area of northern Virginia by car.  We spent about 5 weekends just driving around and looking at a few open houses.  Samantha was a real trooper, although the portable DVD player we said we'd never buy was a big help.  We found that there were only a few neighborhoods in our price range that would meet our basic needs.  A regular detached house was pretty much out of the question, although we did look at a few.  The next option in this area is the townhouse, like the one we are renting now.  I despise living on 3 levels and not having windows on 2 sides of the house, but other than that, the townhouses here are pretty nice (and low maintenance!)  A commute was also going to be necessary, as the area around Adam's job carries California-like prices, and the next ring around that is a slum.

The whole point of starting the house hunting early was to give us time to make a large quantity of low-ball offers, in the hopes of getting a good deal.  We saw a house we really liked, so before we even had a real estate agent we decided to make an offer on our own, working directly with the seller's agent.  This turned out to be a waste of time.  She was supposed to represent both us and the seller, but after 3 meetings with her we realized that we could not trust her, and decided to get an agent.  In the meantime, that house went under contract.  That was ok with us - we knew we had only a slim chance of getting it in the first place, and we were determined not to get emotionally involved in any offers we made.

We know a lot of people who have purchased homes here recently and could have referred us to their agents, but for some reason we decided to use an agent we met at another property and had liked.  I just don't know what possessed us - it was a bad decision.  This agent was helpful in the house hunting process, but once we started making offers we realized she was incompetent and dishonest.  At one point, we had 2 offers outstanding because she neglected to revoke one before we made the next.  If both sellers had accepted those offers, we would have been on the hook to buy 2 houses!  Besides that, this agent had no idea how to be an advocate for us in the negotiation process.  She seemed to feel it was her job to convince us to spend as much money as possible.  We fired her after the 2-offer incident.  We hired a new agent on the recommendation of a friend, and we've been pretty happy with her.

During this whole process, the credit crisis hit.  I was on the phone with our mortgage broker almost daily, trying to keep up with interest rates, down-payment requirements, increasing mortgage insurance costs, and stricter lending practices.  It was a real nightmare.  There were days that we decided to make an offer, but by the time we got the paperwork done we could afford to pay 10% more.  Remember, we were making very low offers on all these properties, so we were trying to offer as much as we could afford at any given point in time.  One day we were all set to make an offer and suddenly every single mortgage insurer decided they would not insure 95% loans.  We could not put more than 5% down, so this basically killed any chance at buying.  We resigned ourselves to renting indefinitely.  A few days later, our broker found that FHA loan rates had come down, and they only required 5% down, so we could manage that way.  We got a lock on that and were about to make another offer when we found the house we ended up buying. 

We called it the "comparison townhouse" because it was in the same neighborhood as the original one we were interested in, was listed for $10K less, and the ad said it had more updates.  We decided to go look at it so that we could use it as a reason to convince the seller of the original house that she was overpriced.  When we saw it we were blown away.  It had a great open floorplan, 4 bedrooms instead of 3, and although it needed some work, was in better shape overall than the first house.  We realized that this was no exercise, but the perfect house for us!

Needless to say, after much haggling, we closed the deal, but not without more nightmarish hassles.  The owner of the house is a real estate agent representing himself and tried to pull every dishonest trick in the book.  We thought we had a ratified contract at one point, only to find out 4 days later that he had never signed 2 pages.  Our new real estate agent isn't perfect either - she told us specifically that he had signed the whole offer (as we were driving to Pennsylvania for my grandmother's funeral) so when Adam and I noticed the missing pages we assumed that they had gotten lost between our agent and us, not that they were never there.  We actually did the home inspection before we had a signed offer, so if he had backed out, we would have lost $450.  He tried everything he could to use this against us, but finally, our agent did her job and got this bastard to sign the papers.  Whew!

A few days after that got resolved, our mortgage broker stopped returning our calls.  When I finally cornered her, she admitted that she could not honor the rate-lock agreement we had made because the rules had changed again.  I'm not sure if she was dishonest or simply incapable of keeping up with the insanity in her industry, but we had to fire her and get a new loan.  I can't tell you how frightening this was.  It's bad enough when this sort of thing happens in a normal market, but with the uncertainty that we had already experienced we thought for sure that we were toast.  Once again, our real estate agent came through for us with some options, and we ended up getting a good loan that is costing us about the same as we had anticipated. 

Since then, things have gone more smoothly.  The home inspection showed that the house is in good shape (although we did find out that the seller lied more than once in the MLS advertisement.)  There were renters living in the house who have since moved out, which had been another huge worry.  The seller has tried to get out of every single thing that he agreed to, but mostly our agent has had to deal with him.  In the declining market we have now, we also had to be concerned about the house not appraising for the amount we paid for it.  In all 3 of my previous real estate purchases I've never had to think about that, but our good eye for value was validated when the appraisal came through.

The sad part is that we never had a day where we felt like, WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!  Somehow, we've morphed into knowing that it will all work out, but there was never a specific moment.  I'm hoping we get our moment when we close escrow on Monday.  I think I'll go buy some champagne just in case.