Educating the Wheelers

While I would certainly not like to be a home-seller in the current Twin Cities’ home market [the last stat I heard was 8 sellers for every buyer], being a buyer isn’t currently a whole lot of fun, either.

I was kind of hoping we’d be in a house by now, but here we are, still crashing at my parents’ house. Our house in Austin sold within 24 hours, for over our asking price, and the proceeds have been sitting in Emigrant, generating interest while waiting to be used for a down payment. [And all of our belonging sit in a PODS storage facility somewhere. Thankfully, the interest does outweigh the PODS monthly storage fee.]

I haven’t been posting because, well, my real name is attached to this. And wouldn’t you google the name of the potential buyer of your property for dirt for negotiating? [And if not, why wouldn’t you?]

But here’s where we currently stand:

We’ve had purchase agreements put in on two houses. One we really, really, really loved. But the sellers didn’t seem to get the memo that the market isn’t what it used to be. They would hardly budge on price — and it really was overpriced — and we very nearly agreed to pay a little too much for the house because it had the highly desirable quality of being less than 4 blocks from my parents’ house. But in the back and forth negotiation with these folks, we felt nickel and dimed the whole way, enough to sour us on the deal. So we walked away. [We actually walked away twice. The first time, they came back to us after a week with a bit of a concession, and we thought they were finally getting realistic … but we quickly were disabused of that notion. And we walked away for good after that.]

The other house … well, it was a great house, too. It was a bit more expensive than the first one, but it was also a better house. We certainly could afford it, but it’d mean we’d be putting less into savings than we’re used to. We’re used to being aggressive savers, and we like it that way. Our feet were starting to feel a little cool, and then when the results of the inspection came back [and particularly after hearing the seller’s response to the problems that came up], they became icy. We wish them luck with another buyer.

We also fired our agent. But that’s a whole other story, one that might be best not being told. Heh. But suffice to say, you really ought to consider refusing to sign an exclusive buyers agreement with your agent, especially if your agent is an unknown quantity. You may be very, very glad you did.

But the real crux of the matter is that most sellers aren’t coming down in price yet, but here we are as buyers, reading the Wall Street Journal, reading the daily paper, watching the news, cruising the interweb, and all signs point to prices further dropping. So. Do you get tired of putting in lowball offers on houses that frankly don’t feel like lowballs, they just feel like an offer that means you won’t spend the first five year underwater on your mortgage? Or do you try to sniff out a seller who “gets it” and has already dropped the price of their home 50k because they come to terms with the fact that that train has already left the station? Or do you get used to living at your parents’ house with your husband and two small kids? [Let’s not even mention the cat and two dogs.]

This story is still developing.

** One thing you find in Minnesota is there are enough lakes that you sure don’t have to be rich to have a “lake house.”