We Bought a House
Holy shit — we did it!! Last Friday, Chris and I closed on our first home ever and to be honest, I think the shock is just now starting to wear off (but really… I am still in shock).
If you read my previous house hunting post, then you know this was not the first house we put an offer on. But the funny thing is, it also wasn’t the first time we made an offer on this property.
Back in June, I saw a listing come up in Chris’s old childhood neighborhood. I sent him the Zillow listing and immediately got a response, “Wow. Great house.”
So we sent the address to our real estate agent, Lisa, and she got us in to see it as quickly as possible. The market in southern California is as crazy as ever and these days it seems houses will have several offers made within the first 24-48 hours of being listed. When we heard back from the seller’s agent, he confirmed they had multiple offers already which meant we needed to make our strongest offer to be as competitive as possible. After seeing the house, we decided to put in an offer at asking price. While we loved the bones and layout of the house, we jokingly called it the Brady Bunch house (nicknamed by my parents) as it was looked like something straight out of the ‘70s. Fun fact: we purchased from the original owner, who bought the house when it was built back in 1976. It’s got the best golden yellow shag carpet everywhere and some pretty cringe-y linoleum in the kitchen and downstairs bath.
A few days passed, and we heard back that there was an offer higher than ours - did we want to counter? It was a difficult choice to make, but we decided to pass on offering anything higher. We already knew our initial offer was the most we wanted to pay knowing the work that still needed to be done. We were starting to become familiar with the process as we’d already lost on a few previous houses, but this one was tough.
Fast forward a few weeks, and we were planning to take a trip out to visit family in Wyoming. We figured we’d take a little break from the house hunt and get out for a vacation. Unfortunately, our plans took a turn at the last minute as we had a potential COVID-19 exposure (someone in Chris’s office had been exposed to a person who tested positive). We decided to cancel the trip and keep ourselves at home until we were able to get tested. We ended up testing negative, which was good, but I was still bummed to miss out on our trip out to Wyoming.
The bright side to it all is that the weekend we started quarantining ourselves, we saw the Brady Bunch house get listed again on Zillow… meaning it fell out of its previous contract! Naturally we were curious to know more (why did it fall out, was there any info/intel our agent could get us?). Just as we were contacting her about it, she let us know their selling agent reached back out, thinking of us from the initial round of offers. Although they re-listed at a higher price (which is what I’m guessing the offer that fell through was at), we decided to put the same offer in that we originally did — and we got it!
I’ll spare you the full drama and details of our inspection, contracts, and the back-and-forth escrow process, but will definitely bring you along as we start to work through all of our projects on this house. Let me know what you’re most interested in seeing!
