Drama

House Buying Drama

So this week has been filled with quite a bit of drama with purchasing our first house, though in the end it all worked out better than expected.  It's just the highs and lows of it and highs...

I guess the first bit of drama was that some copper theives stole the motor out of the air conditioner , apparently they can get 400 bucks if they pull all the copper off the motor.  This house had a 3.5 Ton, 42,000 BDU a/c unit so it's not exactly cheap to replace.   Thankfully i had taken film footage of the house when the a/c was still all together and then took pictures a week later it had been pillaged.  We filed a paper with the selling agency for a repair.  They asked for two quotes which we provided on Monday and we hadn't heard anything back but essentially it was $3100 and $3500 on the quotes to repair it.

Then the appraiser does his pre-inspection research and says the house probably will appraise for 20k less than we offered.  So that mostly just means that we're stuck paying mortgage insurance but i was kind of irritated over that becasue we'd increased our down payment to make the loan 80% and no insurance needed.  In order to do that with the house appraising for 20k less, it would have wiped out the money we had left over to pay for closing, hardwood flooring and some repairs.  So i wasn't happy.

The appraiser went out to the house to give it a walkthrough and he called my broker to say 20k less than offering is still what he things i'll come in at.  SO i talk to my broker and he tells me which houses he's comparing to and that he's using listing prices for a lot of them because i looked them up.  So i told him, look two of these houses we have seen and they have extensive damage inside which ours does not.  One had sledgehammer holes in every single wall in the house for example.  Then i said listing values are irrelevant because they're listing houses way under value in an effort to get tons of bids.  So you have to offer higher than asking if you actually want the house.  When i made the offer i looked at 4bed/3bath and 3bed/2bath houses and made the offer right inbetween what those houses SOLD for since our house is a 3bed+bonus/2.5 bath.  It made sense.  WIth the pool and the 1/4 acre lot which none of these other houses had, I couldn't believe the appraisal was going to be 20k less than I offered.  So the appraiser went out to do the final and he came back only 10k under asking.  So that's a little better, still though we'd end up paying insurance.

Anyway my agent emails the selling agent some disclosures we signed and says the verbal appraisal is 10k less than asking.  They wrote back to send the written appraisal along with an addendum to lower the price of the house !  I was shocked....  So we did and an hour later we got back approval to drop the sale price of the house by 10k to match the appraised value but also an allowance to spend 3100 to repair the a/c unit !  I couldn't believe it!  A 10k drop in price up front over 30 years is like a 30k savings!  w00t!  So with no mortgage insurance and 20% down and the drop of 10k in the sale price, we should be paying a couple hundred less paying for the mortgage than we pay in rent right now!

So we ended the week on a nice high after a low from wednesday.

My time has pretty much been all about packing these past couple weeks.  We rented a storage container up in the area and have been running loads up there on the weekends.  That way we can empty the house out and have more room for sorting/packing and getting stuff together for a garage sale.  I hate moving haha.