WOW

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Permalink Reply by Mr. Apron on January 30, 2009 at 8:10am

Yes, our home-to-be is a short-sale as well. It's a sad story: 95-year-old grammaw living in house alone, can't afford the mortgage. Stupid grandkids put the house in their name and refinanced TWICE (yikes!) and finally the bank took over ans said, "listen, you two dickwads, it's over." However, one of the grandkids is the listing agent for the house, which is making this an emotional transaction instead of a straight business transaction. The biggest joke about this whole thing is that it's called "a short sale." Not for us, that's for sure. This thing has dragged along like a 20-year-old stroked-out dog.

Oh, and our real estate agent's a big pussy. Then again, she does get screamed at over the phone by the rabid sellers at least once a week, so I can't really blame her.

It's awesome. We just want to get in there and rip down some old lady wallpaper.

Permalink Reply by debi on January 30, 2009 at 4:01pm

Aww.. yeah I tried for two short sales and gave up. The one I landed on is bank-owned but it's only a MARGINALLY better experience. My agent pretty much said short sales can take forever and then in the end you can still lose out if it forecloses before your sale closes - so good luck. :) Hopefully it'll just get over with!

It seems kinda.. well conflict of interest, to me, for him to be the listing agent!!!

Permalink Reply by Karie on February 2, 2009 at 11:10am

I want to see! My experience has been a pain. Building a house takes forever and the exact closing date is hard to come up with because the house may not be finished. That is what I've been dealing with. It will so be worth it in the end though.

Permalink Reply by CW on February 2, 2009 at 3:49pm

Good luck with your search! 120+?!!! That's A LOT. We definitely looked at a handful, but we live in a smallish city (100,000) so there's not that much to even choose from....My experience: btw, this is my first home-buying experience, and my husband's second: we started looking and getting pre-approved and all that jazz back in September or October I believe. Getting pre-approval was pretty easy, and saving $$ for our down payment was fairly easy, because we sold our own home back in 2007, moved out of state and rented for a year, and moved back home (and in with the in-laws) while we searched for our new place. Let me tell you, living with the in-laws is serious motivation to save $ and find a house! Anyway, we physically looked at maybe 5 places. We had very specific location requirements (close to the center of the city), and of course our budget, but beyond that, we were pretty flexible. We made 1 offer on a house that didn't go through due to a shoddy inspection, and we ended up in a house that we love but wasn't exactly what we wanted, style-wise. It's easy to get caught up on your idea of the perfect house, but what I learned was that, when budget is an issue especially, you have to consider what fulfills your lifestyle needs. Our house is great--it's not the cute craftsy bungalow style that we'd envisioned; it's a ranch; but it has a great yard, an amazing neighborhood, close to everything, enough space, and is in very good condition. We couldn't really ask for more, even though our house doesn't have a spacious bathroom or an open-concept....you have to sacrifice something, somewhere.

Anyway, the whole process was extremely frustrating, emotional, and exhausting, from negotiating with the seller to find a bank to give us a loan! I was on pins and needles up until the moment we signed those papers and got our keys, thinking that something would fall through and we'd be doomed to our in-laws' basement forever...thankfully, it worked out, and we couldn't be happier.

Also, we bought our house sans-agent. I think agents can be incredibly helpful, but we simply didn't need one, and figured we might save some money in the way of settling on a price--we figured sellers would be more inclined to take a lower price since they wouldn't have to pay commission for the buyer's agent. I'm not sure if that was true, but we did get a good deal on the house. So I like to think that it helped. Of course, we knew pretty much what we wanted in a house and had the time to go search for them ourselves.

So that's my story! No matter how daunting or stressful the process seems like, it IS all worth it once it's over...good luck to everyone out there, it's a great time to buy a home if you can!