Monday, September 23, 2013

Exploring Other Options: Knocking on Doors and Searching for Land

I'm not the type of person who can sit around and wait when I'm excited and anxious about a situation. So we started thinking a little "outside the box". Going into this we did not want a project. We wanted a move-in-ready home. But, sometimes life doesn't cooperate. Sooo we started to ask ourselves: What if we found land and built a house from the ground up?? Or, what if we rehabbed an old house??

Our realtor (being the awesome realtor that she is) had one other great idea. She decided to look up homes that had previously been on the market in the last 12 months and had been taken off the market without a sale for one reason or another. She actually went door to door and spoke with the owners to see if they were still interested in selling their home, and told them she had an interested buyer (us). She returned to us with a few "possibilities", but nothing ever resulted. I thought it was a brilliant idea and a valiant effort on her part!

We started to reach out to friends in the home-building industry to talk about what building a home would entail, and of course the most important fact: $$$$$. We gained an idea of what price range we needed to find land and we updated our search to include empty lots for sale.

Again, having such a small searchable area resulted in few options. We found one viable option that looked beautiful in person. The location was pretty good, it was flat, and the price was well, AMAZING! It seemed almost too good to be true. And you know what they say about something seeming too good to be true...it probably is. And, so this was the case. Apparently this land retained water and had bad soil. Following a rain it basically became a little pond. Womp, womp.

The search continues...

Saturday, September 21, 2013

So We've Officially Looked at EVERY House in Barrington...

Our realtor congratulated us on settling on a specific location/town, and assured us that this was half the battle. We felt a new excitement at the fact that we had narrowed our search down, and we immediately updated our automated MLS search to send us homes only within a 1-1/2 mile radius of downtown Barrington.

With each new email of a property came the possibility that THIS was THE ONE. Over the next 6 weeks we checked our MLS search religiously and scheduled a home visit for every single possibility. I think our first Saturday our with the realtor included 9 homes, but none of them were quite right. This was just the beginning.

I signed us up on Redfin and Trulia in addition to MLS, and I often knew when a new property came on the market before our realtor did. If a new home did come up, we would do our best to schedule a home visit for that very same day. With such a small are to focus on and only so many homes on the market, we were determined to be quicker than any other buyer to put an offer in when we found the one.

About 3 weeks in we had our eye on one of the homes we had seen on our very first time out with the realtor. It was almost "just right", but it had one major flaw. It only had a one-car-garage with a long sloping driveway that was sure to make a popular sled hill for the neighborhood children, and would also be the spark to a nervous breakdown half way through the winter when we couldn't get our car up the icy pavement. In hindsight, It's clear that some desperation had started to set in, as we seriously contemplated making an offer. We visited the home about 4 or 5 times including 2 open house days. We even invited our parents to come see it. Finally, we realized it was just oo big of a deal breaker to make an offer and we moved on.

...But, there was nothing to move on to. We had looked at EVERY home in our search requirements and price range (and even outside of those a little) to no avail. We knew that time was not on our side since it was not Fall and the holidays just around the corner. It was becoming more and more unlikely to see new properties come on the market. No matter how ambitious and proactive we were, we simply could not make a house appear. We had nothing to do but wait...