It’s Friday afternoon, our Realtor calls us and informs Shae and myself that we have an offer coming on our house. “Be warned,” she says, “I think their going to low-ball us.” Some discourse ensues between the two Realtors and we get the offer on our table. It’s about 7k lower than our asking price. It’s a little tight for us so we decide to counter up just a few thousand so that we can make our bottom line. This is where our gamble begins:

I check my pocket. Not a bad start. Ten and Queen, suited. Spades.

The following day, Saturday, we get another call from our Realtor that the buyers have accepted our counter-offer! Almost a year after listing this house, only a handful of walkthroughs in that time, and all of a sudden we had an offer… with cash. Financing a manufactured home is always the difficult part. It certainly looked to us as if things were turning around. Of course there was this little issue of, “Where are we going to go?” You see, when it takes a year to sell your home, you stop looking for a new place after a few weeks of stagnation. So, that night I sat down, cracked my knuckles, and did a Rambo-esque assault on various home-finder websites. [Fun fact: The directors of the original Rambo wanted to have him commit suicide at its' conclusion.] My searches in our price range (loosely) pulled up the following: 3 manufactured homes, 2 pleasant condos, and 1 square-foot-challenged home. Fine. We can deal with the selection. I’m an American, I don’t want choices. Let’s just throw all the worst of the best on a list and call it a 2004 Election. We head up to see the condos since, at this point in our lives, they seem to be just what we need: Low maintenance, decent size, and moderately priced.

Exhibit #1) A nice exterior, single-car garage, ~1450sqft, good size backyard (for a condo). 300 cigarette butts out the backdoor, and urine in the toilet. Well, the repairs will be easy on this place: Sweep the porch and flush the honeypot. Overall: 7/10.

Exhibit #2) A brick exterior, two-car garage, ~1530sqft, slightly larger backyard (for a condo). No cigarette butts, no urine. Easy fix. Same price as #1. Overall: 9/10 (nothing is perfect… I’m from California).

Shae and I don’t like to waste time when it comes to making important decisions. We crunch the numbers, analyze the budget, and employ Heels Redundancy Tests wherever applicable (I learned about this in debate). The next step is financing. We have a few options so we start off with a mortgage company that works with our Realtor. After much hemming and hawing about our income (or lack thereof), it looks like we might actually be able to make an offer on one of these condos.

The Flop: Jack of Spades; Three of Hearts; King of Spades. This is pushing a Royal Flush! The odds of those are like 1 in 649739! Wait… those are horrible odds…

The loan comes through and we’re pre-approved sometime on Monday morning. The stars are definitely aligning themselves in our favor. Within a few hours of that, we start the process of making an offer of 5k less than the asking price and 5k in closing costs. Not a bad offer considering it’s been on the market since early December. Time to sit and cross our fingers…

Stakes rise, hopes plateau, and patience descends. The Turn: Seven of Hearts. Shae’s favorite numbers are now on the table.

They rejected the offer?!?! Why? Someone already offered 5k more than the asking price? Bullocks! Looking back, in hindsight, retrospectively (prize for anyone who knows where I’m looking), we couldn’t afford the loan that would have landed us in that house. Of course that didn’t stop us from trying to make an offer on the first one too (Exhibit #1). That one had an offer earlier in the morning too. No problem there. We couldn’t afford the repairs anyway. Remember, I’m from California: I live vicariously through The O.C., believe everything I hear on AM radio, and I won’t flush your damn toilet.

So at this point we’re back to the drawing board. Can we even afford anything in this entire County? With a roof? I spend half of a day driving around town looking for apartments **just in case** because this poker hand is tasting worse and worse by the minute. This time I pull-up some searches on Craigslist. Low and behold, I find a nice looking 3-bed condo in the downtown area for rent… little more digging and… bingo!

Exhibit #3) A nice exterior (who cares anymore), ~1430 sqft, no backyard (not bad for a condo) but a view of Mt St Helens instead, and a fireplace! 20k less than the first two. 9.9/10

Only problem now is the financing. We can’t get decent rates using a stated-income because I haven’t been receiving my commission long enough to include it, so everyone I talked to wanted to run an 80/20 split (sounds like a bowling reference — feels like it too) with a 5/1 ARM followed with a HELOC (HELOC is an acronym for crap). In talking with another Realtor about the sale price of yet another condo that I just happened to drive past, I was given another name of someone who might be able to get a better loan for us. I followed up immediately and we hit the numbers again. I’m thinking that this should be a pretty easy job: I promise you my kidney and second-born child — you give me the keys. Not so simple. First, we must jump through hoops, but I’m getting the system and lingo down at this point so it’s no big deal. The loans that we are looking at by this time are much safer in the long-run, and easier on the pocket in the short-run. Another offer ensues and…

River: Ace of

… is accepted this evening! Pending everything going well with closing our own sale, we’ll be the proud owners of a new home in less than a month.

Thanks Rambo.

Spades.

This entry was posted Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Events, General. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.