Sunday, October 6, 2013

Risky Business: Making an Offer on a Potential Money Pit

It had been 3 days since the home had been back on the market. We knew that 2 other times this house had gone under contract within 2 and 3 days of being listed. As I mentioned, we had looked at every other home in the area and we knew its competition. Sure, it was old, outdated, smelly, and had 2 other buyers fall through for unknown reasons...But the location was phenomenal, the price was one of the lowest we had seen in the whole area, and it seemed to have massive potential.

We knew that if we made an offer we would have the 5 day inspection period to back out for any reason, so...we decided to make an offer!

We had no way of knowing what the amount of the other offers were that had previously been accepted, but we figured the sellers were most likely motivated seeing that this house was back on the market for a third time. After discussing offers with our realtor we made an offer that was competitive, while hoping not to completely insult the seller. As much as we wanted this situation to work out, we knew that this home needed A LOT of work, and there would most likely be "hidden" inspection issues that we were not yet aware of. We knew every dollar was going to count. We made our offer first thing in the morning.

We were pleasantly surprised when the sellers quickly responded and made a reasonable counter-offer that fell between their asking price and our offer. We countered back, but did not move much from our original offer, knowing it was risky but necessary. They countered again, coming closer to our offer, but informing us that this number was about as low as they were willing to go. We now had a choice: to come up a little and meet their number and the home would be ours, or stay firm on our last offer and hope they were motivated enough to concede. We decided to stay firm, and gave our realtor the OK to say that we stood firm on our final offer.

They accepted!!! We couldn't believe it. The house was ours. Within just a few hours of the initial offer the deal was done.

We were excited and it felt surreal after weeks of searching and searching. It was pretty immediate that a bit of anxiety started to creep in as we wondered what kind of "discoveries" we were about to uncover during the inspection process. Did we just buy our future dream home or a disastrous money pit??? We now had 5 days to complete as many inspections as possible in order to determine if we wanted to back out or continue toward closing...

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