A New House

The housing market was really heating up. I still loved our nice little manageable townhome but other people thought that we should buy a house. I didn’t want to get into anything that would give us more financial strain but Laura was getting claustrophobic.

A lot of people in our church home schooled their children. At first Laura was dead set against it but she had a change of heart before Alexis got to school age. Now that the children were getting bigger, the townhouse was feeling smaller and smaller as she spent her days home schooling and she was ready to move on.

There was a neighborhood nearby that Laura really liked. It was surrounded by the golf course from the local country club, so a number of the houses backed up to the fairways. As the housing market was going crazy with houses going into bidding wars, I wanted to try to find someone who wanted to sell by owner before they signed up with a real estate agent. I decided to go door to door to every house in the neighborhood Laura liked to ask if the owners were thinking about selling.

It took a little while, going on slow workdays when I finished early. I started at the beginning of the neighborhood and worked my way back. About halfway through I found one person who was going to sell but she was also a real estate agent so it wasn’t exactly the situation I was hoping for. I also met a family in one of the houses who went to our church whom I hadn’t yet met. They weren’t selling but invited me in to see their layout.

I finally got to the back of the neighborhood and was kind of fed up because I hadn’t found what I wanted. I finished the second-to-last street and was thinking about giving up on the last one. I decided to just go ahead and finish it out. As I was making my way down the houses, I noticed a guy down the street with his garage open who was going in and out, looking like he was about to leave.

Of course, people had not been home at many of the houses but there were probably some who didn’t answer because they thought I was trying to sell something. Since I saw this guy was definitely at home, I was hoping to get to him before he left. He, on the other hand, looked like he thought I was trying to sell something and was moving fast to get away before I got to him.  

I finally skipped the house before his to catch him. My spiel was, 

            “Hi, my name is Stephen and I’m just going to door to door in the neighborhood, asking people             if they are thinking about selling”. 

When I asked him, he just looked at me strangely and said, 

            “Take a look at the sign in my garage”. 

I looked and saw a “For Sale by Owner” sign. This was a Thursday and he told me he was going to put it up on Saturday. I desperately replied, 

            “Will you please not do that. Can I please bring my wife to see if she likes it first?”

He was just about to take his wife to the airport but they were running late (which is why he had been moving so quickly). He said we could come back later that evening after he had gotten his wife off. I went home to tell Laura the news.

We all drove back later at the agreed time and as we pulled up, Laura exclaimed,

            “Is this the house?” 

Unbeknownst to me, she had driven through the neighborhood and down this street and this was the very house that she liked! 

We knocked on the door and they let us in. The wife had actually missed her flight, which she was kind of okay with because she had the chance to clean up. We walked into the kind of house that would become known as a “Williams” house, a very open floor plan with a cathedral ceiling. We loved it and told them we wanted to call it home.

We got an inspection by someone in our church who did it for a living. He came back with a list of things that he thought made it a bad buy and advised us not to go through with it. But the house was in the neighborhood we wanted, we loved the layout and it was something we thought we could just afford at a time when prices were shooting up. If we didn’t do it now, our chances would be slim. We decided to pull the trigger.

We brought the results of the inspection to the owners and they grudgingly agreed to take care of some of them. They didn’t really have to, given the market. They were building another house so they didn’t want to close right away. The builder told them it would take another couple of months to finish. Construction is never finished when they say it will. We were in no particular hurry because we were going to rent out the town home. But mortgage rates were relatively low at the time and we wanted to close on the new house before they went up.

We asked them if we could close as soon as possible. Then they would rent the house back from us at the price of what their mortgage had been for two months. If it went longer than that, they would then rent it back at our new mortgage rate. The lender’s appraisal came back and it was $5,000 less than the asking price.

After the issues with what the inspector found, the owner wasn’t very happy about the appraisal. He thought that we had used another person from our church and were trying to work him. I assured him that we did not know the appraiser. He was from the lender. It was just that no other house in the neighborhood had sold for that asking price yet.

Prices were going up because people were willing to pay the cash necessary to bridge the gap between appraisal and asking prices. We had some cash but if we paid the $5,000 out of our pocket, it would have been very tight for us. We asked him if he would meet us halfway. We would pay $2,500 in cash and he would take $2,500 less than the asking price. Again, with the market the way it was, he didn’t have to make any concessions but he agreed again.  

We ratified the contract and waited for their new house to be finished. The renting back thing worked out well because you don’t have a first month payment. Their first two month’s rent at their old mortgage rate more than paid for our second month’s payment. Then, sure enough, their house took longer than they were told. So after the two months, they were paying our mortgage for us, which lasted about another month and a half.