The Offer

On Friday night, May 21st, we went to bed wrapped up in the weighty blanket of wine and the impending offer on the property. I was excited and nervous. Just because we were going to make an offer didn’t mean that we would be able to buy the property. Or for the price we wanted to pay for it. The offer is just a small step among many in the process of purchasing. We’d been through this before when we bought our current house. This house came with an easy decision to buy, but a nerve-wracking, nail-biting counter-offer process that left me spent and in tears afraid I’d lose this house over a thousand dollars. I remember getting the call from the agent that the owners accepted our counter-offer at my then place of employment and feeling a huge sense of relief and also kinda weird that my co-workers, Sue and Jerry, knew we’d bought a house even before Dave did.

Though we knew that we were “attractive” buyers this time around, we were also going to offer about $55,000 below the asking price, for a house that was already priced at land value. We were not asking for an inspection, we would close whenever the owner wanted and we were paying cash (we had already secured a hefty home equity line of credit on our current house that we could use to buy land) - these are all very compelling extras for someone to consider in a offer, but what if the other people offered the full asking price? Would all these compelling extras outweigh $55,000? I think not. But we were not in a position to be able to pay the asking price. We had a budget for land: the price we were going to offer + the cost of clearing the lot from the trees and the current structures = our budget. We just could not offer more.

We woke up Saturday morning and began a whirlwind day of events. I had no idea it would be so quick, so stressful or so fruitful.

Saturday :: May 22, 2010

9am :: Called the listing agent to tell her we were making an offer.

10am :: She arrived at our house and we filled out the paperwork for the official offer.

11am :: A counter-offer of an additional $20,000 from the owner in Florida arrived for us to ponder. Aack... so quickly, I wasn’t anticipating such a quick counter-offer. I was prepared and expected to wait a day or two before I heard anything.

11:20 am :: We countered with $10,000 more than our original offer. And then expected to hear right back... but nope.

A couple of nerve-wracking, hair-pulling, on-the-verge-of-throwing-up hours went by...

1pm :: Offer accepted!! The crappy little house was ours!!! yell, scream, cry and hug

2pm :: T-ball game.

4pm :: Signed the purchase and sales agreement and handed over a large deposit check.

4:30pm :: Collapsed on the couch from sheer stress-induced exhaustion.

5pm :: Opened a another bottle of wine... this time to celebrate.

Turns out the other couple did offer more money than we did, but they wanted to renovate the house and so their offer was subject to inspection and securing a bank loan.

Team Phaneuf/Rizzolo = 1

Team Other Couple = better luck next time