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We knew it could happen: losing our short sale bid. We just didn’t think it would go down like this.
Basically, we put in our bid back in… was it late March? Wow yes, March 26th. And then we waited. And waited. And waited. And waited!!!
The seller sat on our offer and never responded to it. The realtors became frustrated and withdrew the listing in an effort to coerce him into responding. In the meantime, somebody else came in and put in another offer! As soon as we found out about that, we upped our bid to their asking price, figuring that we’d get through the bidding process and then figure out the negotiations with the bank later. Then we waited some more.
Finally, the seller responded to our offer – with big fat REJECTED letters written across it! Not only that, but he wrote it across the old, original offer. According to the realtors “he saw the latest offer from us but the terms from the other party were better”. Sounds pretty shady to me.
It turned out that it probably didn’t even matter that he rejected us, because it may not have gone through anyway. A few days after the rejection, the bank moved in to foreclose on the seller. They are trying to work out some sort of negotiation as we speak. Basically, he waited too long and now he’s gonna get foreclosed on. What is wrong with these people??? Why didn’t they just respond a month and a half ago to us and we could have negotiated something that would make everyone happy.
So, I wouldn’t say we were over-optimistic about the house, but of course we got our hopes up at least a little. It’s hard not to when you are forced to wait around for months in limbo. We’d already started making plans on how to improve it, etc.
I should’ve known… who doesn’t love the TLC “Property Virgins” show??!? And this always happens to them on the show!!! We needed this crazy Canadian chick as our realtor – she definitely takes the “tough love” approach ha ha. “This house is ABOOT in your price range…”. The over-enunciated O’s are too much!!!
BUT here comes the positive part!
We started the house hunt a few weeks before this blog was born (abOOT mid-Jan 2011) and really have kept a pretty narrow target of Jefferson County, WV. Then, a great thing happened – both for us personally and for the housing search – we got engaged and have been traveling throughout VA quite a bit in order to plan out the future nuptials! This has been really good because it opened our eyes to more areas that we really have come to like quite a bit, and…. is definitely going to result in us expanding the housing search.
As a project manager by trade and a ridiculous person by night, I’m a firm believer in revisiting the original “scope” periodically throughout the course of the journey. SO let’s take a trip back shall we? To the second post on this blog I ever wrote:
So what is it that we are actually looking for? We first started seriously brainstorming on this topic and making some trips out to the area in early January 2011. Some of our thought processes to date have included many variations of the following:
- A place where we can “get out of town”
- A cabin retreat
- A future home
- A fixer-upper project
- A place to hunt
- A place to grow food
- A place to raise animals
- A rental property
- An investment
I’d say we are still very on target with this. The “cabin retreat” I think could be modified to just “retreat”, since we are not sold on a cabin necessarily. As it turns out, most of the better deals are on actual homes vs. cabins. With regard to the hunting comment, I don’t think that we necessarily need to be able to hunt on our land (since this would generally imply a rather lawless area and/or being too “far out” for our liking), but rather that there be places to hunt nearby.
Our original “must have” requirements:
- Existing home structure with: solid foundation, utilities/water hookups, road leading to it. Cannot be condemned. No trailers, must be an actual house.
- Located on land of some sort. Not necessarily a huge tract as long as it feels somewhat secluded.
- A feeling of serenity, hopefully including a view.
- Seclusion. Not located downtown, not heavily regulated/big HOAs, no nonsense.
- $150,000 or less.
We’ve gotten a bit more specific with this list and I think added a few things. Here’s a stab at the latest revisions (in red):
- Existing home structure with: solid foundation, utilities/water hookups, road leading to it. Cannot be condemned (no tear-downs). No trailers or mobile homes, must be an actual house.
- Located on land of some sort. Bare minimum 1 acre.
- A feeling of serenity, hopefully including a view.
- Seclusion. Not located downtown, not heavily regulated/big HOAs, no nonsense. But, we still would like a sense of community with neighbors.
- $150,000 or less.
- Ability to get cell phone reception/internet.
- No more than roughly 1.5 hours from major airport.
I’ll be blogging more soon about properties we’ve been finding in VA. Right now I’m working on trying to narrow it down to a few counties.
T-111 wasn’t meant to be, at least for now. On to the next one!