Selling our home

Well we have finally started our little journey of building our own home.  First things first, we have to put our current house on the market and pray that we can sell it first.  We put our home on the market in July of 2012.  It was a nice house that was purchased new and served us well for the time being but as our family grew, we honestly just needed more space and wanted a bigger yard.

At the same time we put our home on the market we found another house that we liked in a small cul de sac of only 15 houses.  We put a contract on that house with of course a contingency to sell on our current home and our primary intention was to never end up with two house notes.  Well showings went well for the month of August as we had a lot of traffic and it was very hard keeping the house tidy to show.  We soon figured out the differnce between having our house clean and having our house clean to show (big difference)!  Well after the month of August and a good amount of traffic thru our house, our showings just fell off completely.  Durnig the initial time of sh wing our house we had a lot of lookers but no offers and the fall off in offers was attributed to school starting back by our first agent.  It was hard to get comps since not many 3 bedrooms had sold and the last comp of a 3BR was roughly two years ago.  The only comps we really had to compare were a couple of 2BR which had sold.  The market tanking didn't help the situation as there had been a number of short sales and foreclosures which honestly was killing our comps.  There were alot of 2 bedroom townhomes on our street and very few with 3 bedrooms and a 2 car garage so we figured we would not have a problem selling our home.  Guess I was wrong because November was approaching at this point, traffic was almost non-existent and we still had not had one offer on the table.  Our contract was expiring at this point with our first listing agent and we were at a crossroads.  Although we did like our agent who the house was listed with (she is our buying agent as well), we just felt we needed to change up things, pump in some new blood, get a new sets of eyes, etc into the mix to see if we could get traffic moving thru the house again.

Well in November we made the change to another agent.  It was strictly business and putting all feelings aside for the best intrest of our family.  It was a hard decision for me because we still had her as our buying agent and she was a really nice person.  Our new agent felt we needed new pictures.  We didn't feel staging was a necessary cost and we did our best to just keep our house looknig nice.  Some of our pics are listed below:

Living Room

Kitchen & eat-in

Master Bedroom

2nd Bedroom

3rd Bedroom (lil girl's room)

 

As you can see we did not spend any money staging our house and focused on removing clutter and just keeping it clean.  We really could have cleaned down my little girl's room but I just never got around to it :)  As soon as we listed with the new agent traffic started to increase again but we were going against the trend of home selling as we were  heading into the Winter months and the holidays.  Since we weren't selling, some conventional wisdom says to take your house off the market in the winter months and put it back on when home sales pick up in the Spring.  Other wisdom states to keep your home on the market since most people are taking theirs off so even tho inventory is low, you will be available.  We chose to go with the latter and keep our home on the market.  We had some strange request for showings but for the most part accepted all except 1 or maybe 2 max if I recall.  One request was on the December 23 and we were like someone has to be really interested in our house or want to see what we have under the tree.  Well after getting the house together to show from the holiday clutter, they still did not end up putting an offer on the house which was very disappointing.

We were still getting some showings during the Winter months and only had one offer from an investor who I assume thought we were desperate because his offer wasn't even worth considering.  We wanted to sell badly but wasn't going to just give it away.  During this time the builder had been patient with and we had been extending the contingency to sell every 30 days.  Well it was the beginning of January and time to renew our contingency when the builder decided they would only renew the continency if we could hold both house notes at the sametime.  Well thanks be to God we were able to qualify for both house but it was still something that we did not want to do at all.  The thought of two house notes just wasn't appealing at all.  We went out on leap of faith and prayer and signed the paperwork for them to begin on our new home. 

Well two month later we finally received an offer on our house at the end of February.  We would be out of pocket to close but accepted on the fact of a quick closing by the end of the month.  As we got things together to move our closing date was March 20th.  The buyer had her inspections scheduled and we were hopeful there wouldn't be to much we had to do.  Termite inspection and appraisal went very easy and smooth.  To our suprise on the home inspection, buyer came with her mom to view the place.  We were suprised as we assumed the bank would want a qualified inspector to look a property they were going to lend money on.  The only we needed to fix was the dishwasher and a garbage disposal so in the grand scheme of things not bad at all from our perspective.  We  had everything just about empty and in storage ready to move when on March 19th we got THE call.  Buyer would not be able to close because her info was verified and she had 7 NSF checks and account was overdrawn al in the month of April alone.  We were like what?  It hasn't even been three week in April and our house is just about empty.  Well we had two options from this point, sit around and cry about or continue to move forward and not look back which is what we did.  During the whole process of getting our things moved I never got the dishwasher or garbage disposal fixed.  We had all utilites cut off when we moved out.  When the buyer did her walkthru 6 days later there was no power for her to check the appliances but since she was able to close she went ahead and signed the paperwork.  In the end since the appliances were not fixed, the seller and I agreed on a price of $350.  I can not even begin to explain to you how someone with those things leading up to close was able to close but all I can say is it was by the grace of GOD.  She was able to close and we were finally sold on April 26th.  We did have to bring money to the table but at the end of the day we figured the 1st time we paid two house notes, we would have wish we would have paid the money in order to get our house sold.  Now that chapter is over, we had another chapter awaiting(the fun of new construction)!

Thank you Lord!