Left hand detour

Back in early December as we were looking at houses, we looked at several in one neighborhood, liked the feel of the neighborhood, but hated the floor plans of the houses that were in our price range. We drove by one home and noticed the for sale sign and that it was vacant so we walked through it and within seconds, I wanted the home. It was definitely the "aha!" moment for me. Clean, open, move-in-ready, loved the floor plan. Plus, it was bank-owned which meant we could make an offer, know within 3 days if they would accept or not, and be able to close fairly quickly. I got really excited about it. Problem was we didn't know how much it cost & I knew that was dangerous because I really liked it. After some research, we found the home listed at $129,900 on some websites, and $98,900 on others. Turns out it had just undergone a $31,000 price change. $90,000 has been the top number for us and we just knew that even at $98,900 it was too far out of our price range. And since it had undergone such a huge price change, the bank probably wouldn't be too eager to accept offers nearly $10,000 less than asking price.

Marc started looking at the architectural structures & was quickly able to identify the homes for sale with that floor plan we liked. Lo & behold, we found the home on New Colony (two streets over from the house we liked on Sadie), & talking with the selling agent found out that it was a short sale & was already approved at $80,000. As we looked at the house, it was ok. There was a lot of junk everywhere. Walls that definitely needed paint (especially the kitchen) & the carpet was in decent condition, but definitely something we'd have to spend a couple hundred dollars on to have cleaned before we moved in. We knew that was a bargain & decided to act on it since we thought it was going to be a "quick" short sale. Now we've learned that there is no such thing as a quick short sale.....You know from my previous posts my frustrations & grief about it. We've been wanting to find a back-up plan, and decided over the weekend that if we weren't able to get some straight answers from the bank that we were going to go fishing elsewhere.

Last night, I found out my home that I liked so much had just been lowered $9,000 and was now for sale at $89,800. We called our Realtor right away and told him we wanted to make an offer on it immediately. We spent the next several hours last night waiting for paperwork, signing it, scanning it back to the Realtor. After it was 10:30 & we still needed a few more things, Tyler (our Realtor) said he'd just swing by in the morning, pick up everything (20 + pages of things that we initialed/signed) and put the offer in. I could hardly sleep last night! I'm nervously excited! The biggest risk we face is that we now have two offers in on two different homes, and if they are both accepted at the same time, we're in trouble....but since we haven't signed contracts with the short sale, we should have an out if it comes to that.

So, all this time we've wanted the short sale to hurry up and be accepted, and now we're holding our breath & cautiously wanting more time before it's accepted. The bank-owned home has until Thursday at 5:00 pm to answer us. I really hope we don't have to wait that long to find out. If they don't accept, I won't be devastated, but at least I'll know that we tried. And if the timing goes like it should, if our offer is rejected, we'll still have the home on New Colony that SHOULD be accepted by next week....And if the bank-owned does accept, we will be able to withdraw the other offer on New Colony and realistically be able to move at the end of the month.

Here's a few pictures of the home on Sadie (bank-owned) and the floor plan for both of the homes.