The House

May 14, 2012

The House

On Saturday we went looking at homes as back up to the short sale we put an offer on a few weeks ago and we found a place that just came on the market and fit everything we wanted, good location close to the mall, it didn't need any repairs, has an awesome view, and it's a regular sale (not a foreclosure or short sale). It's a four bedroom, three full bath, 2800 sq ft home. We put in an offer today and the seller accepted it! We'll close at the end of June and are really excited.

It has nice Bosch gas stove and convection double ovens, nice cabinets - pretty much my dream kitchen, and you can see the Sandias from the couch in the living room. The current owner is a realtor and bought it foreclosed. It was rented before the foreclosure and those renters took all the appliances, the counter top, all the light fixtures, window coverings, and ruined the garage door so all those things are new and good quality. The downside is that most of the backyard slopes off down the ridge and is currently unusable. We spoke to the neighbor and they want to extend their fence so they can use their backyard, which sounds good to me. I'd love to do some gardening eventually. The growing season here is long so you can grow lots of different flowers (like roses and ranuculus) and even fruit trees.

We cancelled our offer on the short sale since they never responded. We initially gave the bank a two weeks to respond and then gave them two more weeks when we didn't hear anything. Our realtor spoke to the listing agent who said the bank was still reviewing the seller's documents and would then have to complete the BPO, which is an appraisal the bank has done to determine the value of the home. Sometimes the BPO is higher than the listing price, which is set by the real estate agent and is not always approved by the bank (it will say in the listing if it is an approved price). So there is a chance that the counter offer will come back higher than the listing price. We figured that we were in for a long wait just for the counter offer and in the end the bank may come back with an offer that was way out of our price range. Plus we would have had to spend $10-$15k bringing the place back to a livable condition which would come straight out of our bank account and we were anxious about using up all our savings.

This house has great views of the hot air balloon festival in October and the fireworks on the 4th of July so we're excited to start getting visitors. Here is the grand tour: