Outbid


Blog / Tuesday, December 20th, 2016

I said I wasn’t going to do it, but I got my hopes up. I knew our odds were bad from the beginning and I still let it happen. That doesn’t change that I really did want to buy that house.

Ellie and I lifted our December ban on house showings to see one and go to an open house on Sunday. The showing was a real dud but the open house was exactly what we both wanted. It was the right size with the right yard with the right price in the right place. We saw it again last night, our realtor picked us up due to our dead battery, and we still loved it. So we went forward with an offer.

We haven’t ever put in an offer on a house before but it is certainly one of the most complicated and quickest things you can do. For such a large purchase we had a lot of barriers that were easily overcome. We needed to be approved for financing, done. We needed to fill out our offer, read it and sign it. All done. It was simple and it will make the next offer even simpler.

We were about to make an offer at $165k when the selling realtor came back with a response to a previous question about the roof letting us know she already had several offers and would not consider any under $180k. The house was listed at $165k. It boils my blood when people aren’t upfront about their prices and all of a sudden they go up. If you wanted $180k then say it. I know she probably saw people were offering more and responded with that as guidance, but still. We might not have needed to spend a day scrambling to get everything in order if we knew it would be fifteen thousand more than we thought.

As I said to our realtor, I hope this isn’t the first of many, but we’ll be back regardless in the coming year. We plan to buy a house and it has to be right for us. We thought this one was but the price wasn’t right.

In the future, I’m going to try to reel in my excitement. I’m going to try to keep myself grounded. This experience will be used as an example and hopefully I’ll learn from it.

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