Sold!

The day I left for Denver to look at houses is the same day our house went on the market. I wouldn't recommend leaving on a trip the day a house is listed without the assistance of a husband. I had to pack all my stuff, pack the girls' stuff, and leave with the house looking immaculate.

The day of my trip, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning got myself ready. I then packed all the last minute things I couldn't pack the night before (toiletries, refrigerated foods for the girls, etc.) I packed as much as I could in the car and cleaned everything I didn't get to the night before. (At 1:00 am I had finally collapsed)

The girls were up at 6 am and I immediately brought them downstairs to eat. I packed the remainder of their things (lovies, toiletries, etc) and finished packing the car while they were at the table.) When they were done eating, I took them immediately from the table, put them in the car, and ran inside for 2 seconds to rinse their breakfast plates and throw them in the dishwasher.

I managed to leave the house looking perfect, but it was no easy task! I drove away praying that somebody would make an offer on the house while we were out of town so that I wouldn't have to continue keeping it so clean.

Later that night I got a call from my agent who said that somebody wanted to see the house already. She ended up showing them the house that very same day because their agent was out of town. They didn't want to wait for him to return to see our house. As it turns out, they were renting in our neighborhood and really wanted to stay in it because their kids had lots of great friends there. Seriously, I have no idea why somebody would be so attached to our neighborhood, but to each their own.

Apparently, they have been looking in our neighborhood for months and nothing they wanted came up. Maybe that's because almost every house for sale in Outlook Ridge was a nasty foreclosure or a short sale.

My agent said that they loved the house and couldn't stop raving about how wonderful everything was. They also asked about where the bus stop was and wanted to know the gender and ages of the kids in the cul-de-sac. My agent said these questions were "buying cues" and they wouldn't even ask it unless they were serious.

But, we didn't want to get our hopes up, and afterall, it was only the first day the house had been on the market.

Several days went by and we didn't hear anything. We started to wonder if they weren't interested after all. Our agent contacted them and they called her back saying that they were camping, but would get back to her once they got back into town. But then a few more days went by. We started to lose hope. Only a couple other people had looked at the house and they didn't have much potential.

Then a week and a half after they first looked, they came to look again...this time with their agent. That very same night my agent called and said that they were putting in an offer and that she would email it to us asap. Since it was late Saturday night, we told her that we would respond to their offer on Monday. We had decided at the beginning that we wouldn't do any business on Sunday.

We didn't end up getting that offer like we expected. I swear I checked my email every 10 minutes on Sunday. But, I didn't call our agent to find out what happened because I didn't want to call her on Sunday.

Monday morning I called her first thing. I was surprised to hear that she had emailed the offer to us Saturday night. The email just had never gone through. As it turns out, the wait was for nothing because the offer was low. Way low. About 35K below asking price. Plus they wanted our very nice washer and dryer, our fridge, all the curtains, and 3 large shelves in our toy room. We countered back just barely below our asking price and told them they couldn't have any of the extras except for the shelves and the curtains.

We didn't hear back from them for 4 days....in fact, it was the day before we were going to leave for Birch Bay. Last time we sold a house we were also at Birch Bay. Taking care of real estate business while on vacation is such a hassle!

Anyway, their next counter offer was just as lame. They came up a measly 7k. It became apparent that they were interested in getting a screaming deal. We thanked them for their offer but let them know that we weren't going to respond to it.

We then lowered the price of our house just a tad...hopefully enough to generate some more action. That must have paniced our buyers because the next day they put in another offer. This time it was 15K below asking which wasn't so bad. But still, we wanted to see what else we could get from them. Not that we were trying to be greedy, but we were losing a LOT of money on the sale of this house. At this point, every penny counted if we wanted to be able to buy another house when it was all said and done.

Since we were on vacation, we decided it would be easiest to do the rest of our negotiating verbally at this point. We asked if they could come up another 7.5 k. They said this was really pushing their limit and we didn't hear back for several days. We started to get nervous and thought maybe we should just accept their previous offer.

Finally, we contacted them again and asked if they could at least come up another 3.5 k. They accepted almost immediately and I think both parties were happy!

It took almost a month to reach mutual acceptance from the first time they looked at the house! In the end, we sold it for 13k less than asking price which is not bad for the market. I should also note that the sales price was 2k more than what our agent and another agent we interviewed suggested we even list the house at. Not gloat or anything, but I'm gloating.

For the record, Rick and I both think it's very tacky to discuss finances/money with other people. But, I really wanted to remember how this whole thing went down, hence the blog post. So, forget you read this, ok? I guess house sale prices are public record anyway. Who am I kidding, I'm sure I lost all my readers 5 paragraphs ago.

Oh, and in case you are wondering (which you aren't) we gave them our washer, dryer, fridge, and shelves. Because really, will we really need those in a double wide? It seemed a double-wide was all we could afford at this point...