The Chronic’ WHAT ‘cles of Buying a House

Well, it’s been a few months since we posted last, and for that I am sorry.  Ben and I are in the middle of a house hunt, and put an offer on a house this week, only to find out today that they rejected our offers.  From now on I’ll be chronicling our house hunt here so those of you who will go through this at some point can see the roller coaster this process takes you on.

We started looking about a year ago, but when we got engaged and started planning for the wedding, our priorities changed.  We took several months off, but always kept an eye on the listings to see if something would strike our fancy.  The first few months were rough.  We went to see houses, and always found problems with them that made us shy away from them.  Things like crooked floors, leaky basements, or an acre of land that was mostly swamp.  The good thing about this process is that now we know what we want.  It’s just a matter of finding the house that is for us.

We’re pretty much settled on the fact that we want at least an acre of land, so we can raise goats/chickens/bees and have a garden, as well as fun space for any human children that may come into the picture in the future.  We know we hate ranches, split entry houses, and we need some privacy from our neighbors so the goats/chickens/bees/children don’t bother anybody.  We don’t like cookie cutter houses, and want something that has its quirks, just like Ben and I have our own quirks.  Most importantly, is the price of the house.  We’re looking at homes slightly above our budget with the hopes that we can make a lower offer and have nice, motivated sellers that would accept it.  After several months we found a few houses we’ve liked, but with unmotivated sellers or properties that don’t pique our curiosity, we hadn’t put down an offer.  Until this week.

About a month ago we came across this property in Littleton, MA (where 495 and rte 2 cross one another).  It’s a really cute little town, but this property is on the outskirts, not too close to the town common.  It was an old schoolhouse, with just the kinds of quirks we liked, lots of land, and just the right amount of bedrooms and living space.  We even had my father come by to do a pre-inspection of the property to see what his instinct could tell us.  This week we decided to put an offer on it, with lots of careful conversations and lots of planning.  We knew the seller’s asking price was too high, it was just a matter of figuring out how high we thought it was so that we could make the best educated guess of an offer we could.

The first step was to make sure we had a solid picture in our head of the property.  We made a list of all pros and cons about the property, and ended up with a really big list of pros, but also a list of cons, many of which would require putting money into the house.  Things like the house needing new insulation, or a vapor barrier in the basement were at the top of the list.  We also looked at listings of neighboring houses to see what they recently sold for.  We looked at the pictures of these houses and found that they had other things that our Littleton house was lacking.  By this point we were convinced that we had to offer significantly lower than the current asking price of the home.  The house has been on the market for nearly 8 months and they hadn’t had a single offer yet.  We thought we had a good shot at getting a house we really liked.

Well, apparently the sellers don’t have the same idea, and our counter offer to their counter offer has been rejected.  The owners aren’t very motivated (they don’t live there and have tenants paying them each month), and in the 8 months they’ve only lowered the price of the house $10,000.  Their counter offer was only $10,000 less than what the current listing price is.

I guess this was a good learning experience for us.  We know that there’s no shot in HELL that they’ll sell the house to us now, but at least we learned a lot of valuable analytic skills when it comes to buying houses.  We’re also aware that house owners like their houses a lot and always think they’re worth more, but that isn’t going to stop me!  We want to find a house that fits all of our needs, but also doesn’t break the bank. At this rate we won’t even find another house that fits our criteria for 2-3 more weeks.  Wish us luck for next time!