Adventures of being a home buyer

I had a closing on Thursday that should have been sweet and easy insead  I had to fight over every detail of the closing.

We wrote the first offer for the house on December 22nd.  Our offer was based on a drive by appraisal by a local appraiser.  They countered full price with no concessions.  We decided to let them cool off a bit and wrote our next offer on the 22nd of January.  They did not have any showings or offers during this time.

We offered full asking price asking for closing costs.  Typical on this price house in this area...did we get it?? NO!! their agent came back with 3 options.  All much lower than the asking price, she did not think it would appraise (?) ! Are you kidding me? Better for my buyers but made me wonder what else wasn't what it seemed.

As she did not think it would appraise, we ask to have the appraisal done before the home inspection.  Appraisal came in $1,000 over contract price which was good.  On to the home inspection...we ask for 2 hours and  the inspector was good, but he took 2.5 to do the inspection.  He went into the attic and under the floor.  He looked at their addition and how the deck was connected. He looked at the garage and the porches.  He was very thorough.  We were just going over the report when I got a call from the other agent telling us we would have to leave.  The homeowner was coming home and did not want us there.

The inspection worked out, the loan was cooking right along and so we ordered the survey and termite letter.  The survey worked out, all the pins were there.  Just buried under about a foot of dirt.  No encroachments, no problems.

The termite letter was another issue all together.  The house had termites and needed a treatment.  The home inspector had found tube marks on the walls of the garage, but he did not call it termites.  He had ask that I point it out to the termite inspector for him to make that decision. I showed the termite inspector the spot behind the moving boxes that the home inspector had shown me.  We got a treatment and a letter stating that there were no termites at this time.

Everything was sent off to the underwriters.  A breeze, we had dotted our i's and crossed our t's... 8 days later we got the go ahead to close.  Of course in the mean time we were getting texts and calls everyday about what was happening and if we knew for sure that we were closing?

The day of closing..the final walk through before closing, I had scheduled it for 10am so the buyers could make sure everything was as it should be, go to lunch and then to the 2pm closing.  NO the seller would not allow them in the house before noon.  It was still her house and that was the earliest she would be out.  OK no problem, the buyers re arranged their schedule and away we went. 10:30 am I received a call, it was ok to go in the house the seller was out.

At 2pm we went to closing, the buyer signed their 2" stack of papers. The attorney then left the room to go through them with the secretary.  When he came back he had the seller's signatures, keys  and we were good to go. After a week of talking to the seller and seller's agent, he had decided to put them into another room and keep them away from the buyer to make the closing go smoothly.

I really appreciate good buyers like Melinda and Greg, all the work that Nicole Mapstone did to make the loan go through,  and  all that TJ Bagwell did to have an easy closing.  I would love to say that I will never sell another one of the other agent's  listings but I know better.  We live in a small town and no matter how hard you work at it, you will bump into each other again.

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Tags: buying a house, 1st time home buyer