Home-Buying, Part 2

Our New Home!

Day 7 was quite a bit more successful, although still a little stressful.

This morning, we heard from our agent that the bank had not updated their conditional approval letter (previously called a “pre-approval letter”) to reflect our new asking price ($5k under asking rather than $12k under asking), so the seller’s agent never even forwarded it to the sellers.  A quick call to our mortgage company later, and the letter was off.  Only a few hours later, we received word back that the sellers had verbally agreed to our offer with a minor change – we had asked for the entire house to be re-painted with white primer, but they only wanted to put primer on non-white walls.  Minor distinction (and not really important to us), but a distinction that had to be made in writing.

You might note that I used the words “verbally agreed.”  This is because the sellers don’t live in VA Beach anymore – they moved to North Carolina some time ago.  So the seller’s agent (based here) had to drive 4 hours to North Carolina in order to get them to sign the papers – which they did!  We very quickly drove to our agent’s office to sign the papers indicating we agreed to the slight change in wording, followed by a trip to Haynes (a local home furnishing store) to look at carpet and hardwood floors.

So as of March 19, we are homeowners.  At least, given several contingencies.  One, our financing has to come through (of course).  Two, the house must be appriased for more than we paid for it.  Three, the sellers must repair anything troubling discovered in the home inspection.  We managed to find an inspector willing to schedule a next-day inspection, so around 4PM tomorrow, we’ll be heading to the house with our agent to listen to the inspector tell us about our new house for a few hours.  Fun times!

Our agent seems honestly surprised that this all worked out.  We went from looking at our first house to having an accepted offer in one week!  Not bad, eh?