The Brad Hole

Everyone has told us recently that houses we will like will continue to come up in our search, and that seems to be true. Take yesterday, for example.

On Thursdays, I have a weekly conference call with Aspyr in the afternoon, so I wasn't planning on doing any house hunting on these days. Still, a new house entered our list Wednesday night that was in the same subdivision as the first one that got away, so we were a bit anxious to check it out. After some talking with our realtor, it was decided that I would drive up there after my call and investigate. Most of these places are a 40 minute drive (one-way) from our current home. I happened to hit rush hour traffic most of the way, so I got there around 4:15p yesterday.

As it happens, the house was the best of the 3 that we've been open to buying. Remembering yesterday's incident, I talked it over with our realtor and made an offer $5k above the asking price on the spot. Asking for more than the asking price is tricky business - you can't indefinitely raise the stakes because you run into problems with the appraisal value of the house. It's my limited understanding that if the house appraises for less than you offer, the loan company will only cover up to the appraised value. In that situation, the only way you can pay "more" is to stipulate in your offer that you'll essentially pay the difference above the appraisal value in cash. Why am I mentioning this? ;-)

Well, it seems that we were again too slow. Someone had made an offer on this house 30 minutes before we did, with the stipulation that they'd match any price up to a certain value. Upon discovering this, we increased our offer to $10k above the asking price. This is where the danger of the appraisal value came into play. Our realtor (and the selling realtor) both felt fairly sure that the appraisal value of the house was close to the original asking price, so any offer we'd make in excess could potentially run afoul of that problem.

After some back and forth, the selling realtor decided to go with the original offer which matched ours. It was at this point that our realtor gave us a free primer in creative swearing. The people who beat us, we discovered, were basically in the same boat as Beth and I. They'd been getting beat out on houses that had come on the market the same day or the day before and decided to take their game to the next level. It makes sense, of course, and that's where Beth and I are now headed, it seems.

Speaking of, where was Beth during all this? She got off work at 5, so we told her to haul ass up here if she wanted to see it. It's a 45-50 minute drive for her in the thick of rush hour, and by the time she made it, the house had been gone for 10-15 minutes. That's 2 in a row now she's never seen. She still had class at 7pm, but there was no way she could have made it back in a reasonable time, so she missed it as well.

So, what's next? Our even-more-aggressive strategy now is pretty simple. If an interesting new home pops up the night before, I'll hit it bright and early the next morning, prepared to make an offer with a "matching" clause on the spot. Beth won't stand a chance of having seen the house until after our offer has been accepted at this point, but it seems that's the way it's going to have to be.

As for this latest one that got away, well, it was clearly the best I'd seen so far. Apparently everyone else thought so as well, simply because in the hour I was there, half a dozen groups of people must have come by to look at it. They all seemed like families rather than investor types, but it was madness.