House Hunting Blues

Three months into the house hunting process, and two months into the house selling process, and I AM SO DONE WITH THIS SHIT.

I'm getting impatient. (Obviously.) We are having very little luck, and it is tremendously frustrating.

At the very beginning of this month, we put in an offer on a house we loved only to have it rejected because we were unwilling to remove our contingency. And, well, come to find out, that was a smart decision on our part, because have we sold our current place? No, we haven't.

In fact, we have not had a single showing in nearly three weeks. Not good. When we first put our place on the market, we were doing well for the first 5 weeks or so--at least one showing a week, and we had an open house as well. We received great feedback from people, but no one willing to put an actual offer on the table. Now, we're feeling a bit of pressure from our realtor to lower our asking price. Although we're not necessarily against that, we are disagreeing over how much. We'd like to lower it about 2.5%, and she would like to lower it about 4-5%. As a result of our disagreement, we haven't lowered it at all.

Honestly, we're not sure what to do. We are heading into April, and supposedly the market is supposed to pick up. Do we lower the price to make our listing appear "fresh" and to try to attract more buyers? Or do we hold tight, assuming that the right buyer will come along now that "the season" for real estate is upon us?

There's also part of us that doesn't even care if we can't sell our place right now because, well, it's not like we have a place to go. We don't have a new house to move into, so what's the rush? Of course, the other side of that argument is that if the right house for us does pop up onto the market, we would be in much better shape to make an "attractive" offer on it if we were already under contract on our current place.

This is such a balancing act and a waiting game. I hate it.

Last weekend, we looked at a house that we weren't expecting to like that much. It needed A LOT of work, and it was evident in the pictures. Even more evident as we walked through it. It was a house built in the 1960s, and I'm not kidding when I say that the sellers have lived in the house and HAVE NOT UPDATED A SINGLE THING. Kitchen? Needed to be gutted. Bathrooms? Needed to be gutted. All interior and exterior doors needed replacing. It needed new carpeting in the family room, stairs, and upstairs hallway. The entire house needed to be freshly painted. In other words, this was so totally the opposite of what we said we wanted when we set out on our house hunt.

But, you know, somehow, we fell in love with it. We fell in love with the idea of being able to choose everything according to our taste. Being able to make everything fresh and bright and brand new. Being able to buy more house for the money. We weren't CRAZY in love with the place, because we knew it was going to cost a lot of money to do all of these things. But we were seriously considering our options. We were researching costs for renovations and materials we would need. We figured if we could get the house for a good price (which, by our definition, was a good chunk below asking price), it would be worth buying. So, we had an appointment to return to the house with our parents to get their opinions.

And just 10 minutes before I was supposed to leave work to go to the appointment, our realtor called and said that the sellers of the house were dealing with an offer they had received earlier that afternoon. That the offer was reasonable and that the sellers were working with it.

We weren't willing to compete with someone else for the house. We had a price that we were willing to pay for it, and we knew that we would have to be willing to pay more. And we weren't.

So we let the house go.

And now we are back at square one. Again.

Unfortunately, there has not been a single new listing (meeting our criteria) that has popped up this week. Isn't the market supposed to be picking up? That's what everyone keeps telling us, but we have yet to see this big "boom" in listings.

Believe me, we are waiting.

Impatiently.