Strike One

So I told you yesterday about a house that we’d fallen in love with enough to put in an offer…well, here are the details. (Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures to share, so you’ll have to use your imagination…)

After looking at a few options, we found a three level ranch, which sounds weird, but basically it was a three story house built into a hill, and instead of going up, the “top” floor was the only thing you could see when you pulled up, and then the rest of the floors were beneath it. Each level had ground access.

The lot was a huge hill, and not necessarily ideal for the dog, but it was landscaped, and terraced out to a point that we thought we could make it work.

The top floor had the kitchen, living/dining rooms, and master bed and bath. The middle level had two more bedrooms, bathroom, another living area with fireplace, and a laundry room. The bottom level was just an empty partially finished area. We envisioned finishing it out for a mother in law suite.

The house is in a VERY desirable neighborhood, and the location was great for Shannon’s commute. We’re only looking on the Iowa side of the river, even though Shannon is working in Illinois, because the tax situation and school systems are better on the Iowa side.

The house is a buyout situation, meaning that right now it is owned by a company as opposed to a person. It has been owned by said company since September, with zero offers on it…so we assumed they would be very motivated to sell. Knowing this, Shannon put in an offer for 40K less than the list price (Which I’ll refer to as $X), with a contingency on a successful closing on our house by June, 15.

They countered back, and reduced the price by 5K. At which point, we walked away, since it didn’t appear they were willing to play ball. A few hours later, our realtor called us back, and told us that they had decided to sign it back to us at $X-30K, but they wanted to move the closing date up to May 15, and wouldn’t place a contingency on the closing of our current house.

Our realtor told us we had until end of business to decide…(which was about 2.5 hours)…then called back and told us that someone else was putting an offer in, and we’d better make a decision in the next 30 minutes. (We’re fairly certain this was a ploy, since there had been no movement on the house in six months…but we’re not for sure)

Since we’re in a buyout situation, we KNOW that our house will be out of our hands 90 days after our list date, however, we don’t know yet how much money we’re going to get for it….this is where to problem was. Shan was willing to meet the price, but was not willing to take the risk without knowing what our buyout will be.

With that said, we told our realtor to tell them we’d take it ONLY if they agreed to put the closing contingency back in the contract. And, apparently they didn’t like that.

We don’t know if the “other guy” bought the house, or what. It’s not listed any longer online, but that could just be because it was supposed to go to another listing agent at the beginning of April. We continue to check online every few days to see if it is relisted…but until then we’re putting together another list of houses we want to look at…so, we’ll see what happens!

UPDATE: The "other guy" did indeed get the other house for 3% more than we offered. Oh well. Onward and Upward!