Friday, April 06, 2007

A Crazy Story

On Feb 22nd, I wrote about how I saw this house I liked. It was the same day we had listed our townhouse. Robin didn't get to look at that house. (from here on, I will call it the Alexandria house.) And we headed out of town for 10 days. Our only thought was maybe when we get back if we have an offer on ours and if Alexandria's still on the market we could make an offer. It was listed at $249K and we were really looking at $240 as our max.

Well the day we got an offer on our house (march 13th) Alexandria went off the market. We had thought it was in foreclosure but it was in transition and the time passed for the owner to sell it. We were told it could takes months for it to reappear.


Our realtor worked behind the scenes to see if his investor friend could buy Alexandria from bank and turn around and sell it to us at $240K but the bank's lawyers were not interested.


So we moved on and looked at this other house last weekend. It was two blocks from Alexandria and almost the exact same layout. it just didn't back up to open space, have a few of mountains, wasn't on a cul-de-sac, didn't have a/c, newer furnace, newer roof, etc. But had moved on. (I deleted all the pics I took of it for Robin, too.) We thought Alexandria was a lost cause and we were closing soon and needed a home. We still liked this other one as it was far better than most of what we had seen. We made an offer of $227K but they didn't take it and wouldn't come down much.


We were considering whether to offer another amount when our realtor Jesse said that he learned Alexandria was coming back on the market and the realtor may let us see it before it goes on MLS. They didn't know how much but that realtor was suggesting $234K to the bank.


So today Jesse called and it was going to be listed at $229.9K! The catch was that two other people were given same option to see it this weekend. So we may be in for a bidding war.


I drove from work, Robin piled the kids in the van and we met Jesse at Alexandria and looked again. I already had seen it of course but Robin had only peeked in the windows. Then we drove back to Jesse's house and signed official papers to make an offer of $229.9K for Alexandria. We made it before the bank closed for Easter weekend.


So I guess this will either be a really cool story of how the Lord provided this house for us and for about $20K less and even $10K less than another price we were gonna pay. And less than were we stand for a house that's similar but not quite as nice.


We should know something by Monday. Pray that the Lord's will be done and if we need to counter offer in a bidding war that we will know clearly how much to go up.


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