Today marked our official re-entry into the world of first time home-buyers. Our previous attempts were less than fruitful, obviously, for home ownership, but did provide us with a lot of newbie-experiences (including what we wanted in a realtor as well as in a home).
We’ve perused the MLS listings for the last few months, with nothing truly new or worthy on the market. I decided a month ago, however, to lower my standards, widen my search and really make a job of monitoring the listings and immediate areas. Then, whamo, a week and a half ago a handful of homes opened up – some that even fell into my higher standard range. It was all about rubbing elbows, honestly. A neighbor of a friend of a friend type leads. A few days of driving up and down neighborhood roads, peeking in empty homes and talking to would-be neighbors about the areas and specific homes. Finally, we started seeing things that were do-able – all that was left was to re-apply for our loan (our old one had expired) and decide if we wanted our old REA. That was a touchy subject between DH and myself. Ultimately, we opted to keep everyone in our prior house hunting excursions except for our REA. More feelers went out, and we came up with a new (to us) REA. Having met her today, DH and I both are feeling like we made a great move in seeking her out for our search.
Tonight we had five homes on the list, and could only get into three and a half. (The “half” is a joke, we saw a duplex that was half-occupied, so we only saw half the building. The other missing home seemed to not include their lock-box key, but just walking around it’s yard we were able to cross it off our list.) One of the homes (a giant mass with narrow halls and a seemingly unending number of rooms) will be a grande home for someone – and is priced low, but still to high for its present condition. Crossed off our list. Another missing home had a realtor who hadn’t returned our REA’s phone call, so it’s moved to next week.
There was one home, less than 48 hours ago the owners received their foreclosure notice. It was wonderful. Roughly 10K in repairs could be thrown at it – but structure seems good and the updates that have been done leave little complaint other than cosmetic issues here and there.
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