Month: May 2014
Open House #2
Lots happened last week, everyone. We had our open house last Sunday (from noon to 5), and we had a whopping TWO people come by the whole time. We were a little disappointed, but the second person stayed for a while, asked a ton of questions, and seemed fairly serious about it. (Also, I kind of know her through the gym.) That night we got a call from her realtor – boom. An offer. Her realtor was god-awful and terribly rude to us (we’re doing a FSBO for a reason – we’re willing to give 1% to the buyer’s agent, not 3), but the offer came in anyway. It was a little low, but dude! An offer! So we panicked. Kind of. We were SO not prepared for that. We had planned on using a real estate attorney to help us with closing, but we hadn’t even begun to find one. Also, the buyer only gave us 18 hours to respond (the offer came in at 9pm Sunday – she gave us until 3pm Monday), so we spent Monday morning frantically trying to a) find a lawyer and/or b) figure out how we should counter. Because we wanted to counter. It was a reasonable, very fair counter. Anyway, I found a real estate lawyer (through my gym again) who gave us great advice, and then at 2:45 (because that’s when I heard back from our new lawyer) I printed out the offer, made our changes, initialled and signed everything, scanned in the signed copy, emailed it to John, who printed, initialled and signed, scanned it in, and emailed the whole thing back to the agent. At 2:50, I emailed her to let her know it was coming. She got it by 3:15. We gave them until 5pm Tuesday (a whole 26 hours) to get back to us.
Silence. Just nothing. No response. Wednesday morning, I emailed the agent to confirm that their lack of response meant they weren’t interested in countering or accepting. She replied quickly to tell me that was correct, and that was the end of that. Except that we plan to email the buyer directly (because we have her information and I kind of know her) just to check in and be friendly. There’s really no reason we haven’t done it yet. Anyway, even though it didn’t pan out, it was exciting, and we feel good about it. We do NOT regret not taking her initial offer.
Tuesday night we showed the house to a guy who seemed positive but is in no hurry whatsoever. We made a deal with an agent we really like (he’s given us all kinds of advice on how to sell on our own, how to deal with buyer’s agents and the whole commission thing, and lots of other things) to have him list our house on the MLS for a flat fee, so we’re out there for agents to find us. We’re having an open house right now (and clearly so overrun with people that I don’t have any time to write….oh, wait a minute), from noon to 3, with a showing between 3 and 3:30 and a guy who’s going to come by around 1.
It’s been busy. We’re still homeowners, Riley is in a slow decline (his x-rays Monday morning were not positive), work sucks and is about to get suckier, and it’s the one-year anniversary of Roxy’s death, but hey – I had a milkshake for dinner last night and the weather is beautiful. It’s not all bad.