Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Real Estate - Entry for April 27, 2006

I'm *so* stressed about this house!
Here's the story. We've been looking for a house via realtor.com for several months now. We've gone to a few open houses, and have driven past dozens. About a month ago we finally saw one that we actually liked that was in a nice neighborhood. A few weeks later when Pete's parents were in town, we called the seller's realtor to look at the house again. After looking at it for a second time, we mentioned to the realtor that we would probably put in an offer after we got a pre-approval on a mortgage. Pete had a busy week, so we didn't get the pre-approval right away. On Wednesday, we got the pre-approval letter, and that afternoon the realtor called to see if we were still interested in the house because he was going to have another open house if needed. So, we made an appointment to sit down with him for this morning (Thursday) and make an offer. We felt like the house was a bit overpriced, and wanted to put in a low offer. We didn't want to offend the sellers by making it TOO low, so we needed some opinions on what was too low. Pete called his real estate "expert" (his friend who has actually bought a house) to get his opinion. His opinion was that we needed to get a buyer's agent. It was 5pm. How could we possibly get an agent before 9am????
Here's where the story gets interesting . The phone rings 5 minutes after Pete gets off the phone with his friend. It's another realtor calling about a different house we looked at a couple of times. She wanted to know if we were still interested in it. I had met her a couple of times, and she seemed nice enough and helpful, so I just asked her if she would be our sellers agent! She agreed, of course, and immediately started researching the house while I was still on the phone. She found out how much the sellers bought the house for back in 2000, and we were right about it being overpriced now... So, she came over at 9:30pm (after visiting the house in question), and we got our offer together and signed the buyer's agent agreement. I don't know a nice way to say this, so I'll just say that we would have been screwed if we didn't have our own agent.
We didn't understand that last night's meeting was going to take the place of this morning's meeting, though we probably should have. It was late, and we are clueless about this whole process. This morning, the seller's agent called and he was MAD! He was not happy that we now had a buyer's agent... Anyway, our agent said we didn't have to talk to him again, since that was now her job. Thank goodness, because I'm starting to get stressed over here! They got our offer at 9am, and they have until 10pm to respond...

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