House-Buying Saga

It's been a couple of weeks since I alluded to writing this post, but, hey, I just had a baby :) Anyway, I want to share with you all the experiences we've had on the house-buying side of this move. It all started back back on January 9th of this year, when I wrote my first email to a Birmingham realtor...

I regularly communicated with several different realtors as I tried to feel out who would be the best fit for us. I knew we needed an agent who was hardworking, knowledgeable, not too busy with other customers, and willing to provide some atypical services for us since we are out-of-town buyers. I eventually settled on an agent, and we began the seemingly endless process of searching through listings, choosing some, getting more information, eliminating some, searching through more listings and on and on the process goes.

By the middle of February, I had a list of about 30 houses that seemed to be decent possibilities. We took our first trip to Birmingham Feb 15-17. (Keep in mind, Marcus only gets one day off each week, so he would have to work for 12 days straight as well as beg and plead to get a Saturday and Sunday off for a house-hunting trip.) We set off full of optimism and excitement...Caleb was at home with his Mimi (Marc's Mom) and we were off on our first childless trip. We even paid for two nights in a (very cheap) hotel, so it was an exciting excursion.

While we were driving, our agent Colleen called to tell us that about 1/3 of the houses we'd picked out were off the market for one reason or another. That was disappointing, but we still had almost 20 houses to see, so our excitement was barely diminished. The house-hunting went well that weekend, but we found a cute little house on Locke Lane that we really liked, so we made an offer on it and headed back to Florida. We were very excited about the house, though a little nervous about making an offer before our Gainesville house had sold. Regardless, we went through a stressful five days of negotiations until we finally had a price and closing date nailed down. I was very excited and sent out pictures of the house to family members and told all my friends about it, admittedly prematurely. Several days later, we got the inspection report back from our home inspector. Apparently the house was a mess...the roof, AC and heater were at the end of their lives, there were structural issues (foundation cracks, etc.), and to top it all off, the downstairs bathroom had no plumbing...just fixtures sitting in there to make it look like a bathroom. Wow! Did that series of blows ever pop our balloon! To make matters worse, the sellers decided to kick and scream about releasing our $1,000 binder deposit, even though it was entirely within our contractual rights to cancel the contract because of an unsatisfactory inspection. The sellers continued to refuse to sign the binder release document for about a week, but finally we got an email saying they had signed it, and we got our money back almost 2 weeks later.

Well this whole first-contract experience left us very disillusioned. We were frustrated and uncomfortable about the many differences between how things are done here in Gainesville and how they are done in Birmingham (pertaining to real estate). As a realtor, I'm aware that real estate practice and law varies greatly from town to town, but I still struggled with things that seemed unwise or unfair compared to how we do things here.

Anyway, we were now back at square one. I moped for a couple of days, and then I got on the computer and resumed the previously-mentioned cycle of choosing houses. It only took a couple of weeks to rebuild my list. In fact, a few days before our second trip, Marcus and I even decided to make an offer on our second-favorite house from the first trip. This house was more expensive than what we wanted to pay, and we didn't like it as much as the other one, so we decided to give a low offer and just see what happened. Feeling good about our emotionally detached offer on the Tal Brook Rd house, we hit the road for Birmingham again on March 7-9. This time, Caleb stayed with his Aunt Traci, and we stayed in Birmingham with our friends the Howards...no extra money for hotels on this second trip.

The second trip was not charged with the same excitement, and we both felt more tense because I was 35 weeks pregnant and we knew this would be my last trip. We didn't like the houses as much on this trip, mostly because we'd seen the cream of the crop in Hoover (where we most wanted to live), and we were now exploring some houses in Pelham (the town south of Hoover), though neither of us felt good about a longer commute. On Sunday, while we were still in Birmingham, we found out that the owners of the Tal Brook house were not going to respond to our low offer. So we shrugged our shoulders and decided to offer on one of the houses in Pelham that we liked (Chandalar Way). This seller also didn't like our low offer, and he piddled around for several days about making a counter-offer. By the time he finally gave us a number back, we had gotten an email from a resident who lives in Pelham warning us that the commute is even longer than we'd thought, so we had pretty much lost interest in that house.

By now, we'd been back in Gainesville for several days, and we were feeling very discouraged about finding a house. We'd made two trips to no avail. Marcus had no more weekends off until after my due date, and I couldn't travel anymore. Then I found a house online (Loch Ridge Trail) that looked absolutely perfect for us...far more perfect than the 3 houses we'd already offered on. It had lots of pictures and a virtual tour which gave us a very good feel for the layout and condition of the house. We decided to ask Colleen to preview the house for us and take some additional pictures. She did so, and everything she found out made us like it even more. (Marcus went to see this house on his next trip, and we still believe to this day that it was the most perfect house for us.) Marcus and I were both so excited about this one that we agreed to make an offer sight unseen. We even decided to offer much closer to the asking price than we ever had before, both because we were learning from our mistakes and because we REALLY liked this house. We submitted our offer and waited with great excitement for a reply. We really thought this was going to be it...we had made a good offer this time.

Within 24-hours of submitting our offer, we got the phone call. The sellers' agent had done an extremely unethical thing...he had posted the house on the MLS as NOT located in a flood zone, even though he had in his possession a letter stating the the house was located in a high-risk flood zone. The agent told us after our offer was submitted, of course hoping that we would still be interested in the house. We were furious. We'd fallen right into this agent's unethical trap...we found out about the flood zone after we were already in love with the house, though we never even would have considered the house if we'd known about the flood zone. (It's a bad move to buy a house in a flood zone, because owners have to purchase expensive separate flood insurance, and its also much harder to find a buyer when the time comes to sell.) We deliberated for about a week, and finally decided we just couldn't make such a bad move, no matter how much we liked the house. But we did write a letter to the owners of the house asking them if they would consider us as renters. The owners called us and we had a very good conversation, but they really wanted to sell rather than rent, so we closed the door on that house for good.

On March 27th, one week before Ethan was born, Marcus went back to Birmingham for one day to look at a few more houses. He went to work Thursday morning, left work around 5 pm, arrived in Birmingham after midnight, got up at 8 am, looked at houses all day on Friday, got back to Gainesville around 11 pm, and then went in for a 30-hour shift on Saturday morning. Talk about insanity! We were so desperate to find somewhere to live before Ethan was born, knowing that making such huge decisions on no sleep was a very bad idea. This third trip was the least fruitful...we really didn't like a single house from this group. After Marcus got home and we watched the video he took of the houses, we finally decided that something had to give. We had to accept a longer commute and a house that did not have all the rooms we wanted, or we had to increase our price range. From this point, I started looking online for houses in the next price range. I found lots of promising ones, and Colleen was gracious enough to preview three of them and send us pictures. The third one stood out clearly as the best, and we decided to once again make an offer sight unseen. While Colleen was busy writing up the offer, my water broke and we headed to the hospital to welcome Ethan into the world. We signed the offer the day we got home from the hospital. The next day, the sellers counter-offered very reasonably. Ethan was 3 days old, and we had to decide whether to counter-offer again, or to have Marcus drive back to Birmingham to see the house before we went any further in the process. Susan (Marc's mom) was here with us, and she offered to pay for the trip to Birmingham if Marcus wanted to go. Since Susan was here to help me with the boys, Marcus decided to take the day trip.

When he got home with the pictures, we both agreed that this house would be wonderful for our family. The only thing we don't like about it is that the yard is sloped, making playing soccer in the backyard not possible. But everything else about the house, especially the location and the floor plan, are ideal for us. We finalized the details with the sellers the next day, and had the house under contract when Ethan was 5-days-old. We weren't really excited yet, because we'd had everything fall through so many times. Regardless of our skepticism, we received a huge blessing the day our contract was finalized...the interest rate for our loan, which had been steadily climbing higher by about 1/8 of a point every few days, dropped 5/8 of a point in ONE DAY. It was at 5.875%, which was the exact rate we needed to keep our payment affordable. So we locked in our rate that day and breathed a huge sigh of relief as the last major variable was removed. Because of this blessing, I felt very optimistic about the remaining items that needed to fall into place. And just as we hoped, the inspection went smoothly, the sellers agreed to fix all of the small items that we requested to have repaired, our loan was approved, and the appraisal came in high enough. Now there are no contingencies left, and we are just waiting to close on June 6th.

We feel so relieved that the numerous uncertainties we were facing when this year began are now largely worked out. Our house is sold, Ethan is healthy and strong, and we have a place to live in Birmingham that we are excited about. We feel very grateful for the blessings we are experiencing.

All of the pictures in this post are of the house we have under contract and plan to move into in June. All of the others are just an unpleasant memory. (Grandmothers, the next post will be all about Ethan, I promise :)