Sunday, July 4, 2010

It's going to be sketchy for a while

Wow! Has it really been almost 3 months since I last blogged?!?!? My how time flies!!!

Well, a quick update on my life...

Hubs and I sold the house. The good news is just that, we sold the house. The bad news is we didn't sell for what we had hoped to sell it for but I suppose we will just chalk that up to the cost of "getting out" when we did. And are we glad we got out when we did! When we first put the house on the market last year there were 4 foreclosures in our neighborhood (several more than that if you factored in the 'hoods that were attached to ours). When we closed over a week ago there were 14 foreclosures. Yes, FOURTEEN and that isn't even counting the neighborhoods that are adjacent to ours! Most of these were priced well below market value so I honestly believe these would only have hurt our value even more and we are truly blessed to have gotten out when we did and walk away with cash at closing versus having to bring a check to "pay someone to buy our house" like a lot of people.

Unfortunately, we are now what I am calling "houseless." We aren't homeless because home is wherever WE are but we don't have a house to call home right now. Hubs and I looked and looked. We decided not to commit ourselves to buying another house until we knew the sale of ours was an ace-in-the-hole. We just felt that was a smart thing to do. God forbid the deal on our sale fall though. Anyway, we "lost out" on several houses and were never able to make any of the deals work so here we are sold, closed and funded with no "new" house to go to.

Granted, there have been offers written and houses I have liked. Multiple offer situations and an agent who (I thought) wasn't looking out for our best interests and didn't know enough to "win" the game don't equate for a good outcome. We lost out on 2houses that I LOVED and I don't know that I'll ever be able to get over them. :(

But I digress...sulking over losing a dream home (or two) isn't getting us anywhere.

So the day after closing on the sale of our home I sent a (politically correct) email to our (old) agent and fired her. Ahhh...

We have a new realtor. A guy my mother's broker referred. He's been in real estate for over 25 years and seems to know his stuff. He seems like he's a much better negotiator too and that my friends is probably more important in this part of the process.

Anyway, the gist of it is, we have written 2 (very, very reasonable) offers on 2 different houses within the last week. We haven't nailed one yet but we feel confident that we are going to do that soon.

In the meantime, because everything we own (short a few "suitcases" full of clothes) is in storage and I have no place to put anything I buy much less any time to really research the deals (between taking care of the kids and the house hunting I have very little free time) but I assure you, once we get into the next house, I will be back and back in full force!

Until then, please cross your fingers and pray for us (and my sanity) that we find the perfect house...SOON!