Well, as I mentioned, it was a crazy couple weeks trying to get The Escher House on the market before the tax credit expired, but our hard work paid off — two days after it was listed we received our first offer. And within 24 hours after that, we had negotiated a full-price contract, and are moving forward with these buyers…
I have a feeling we still have a couple hurdles to overcome for this deal to close. First, the buyers are FHA, and given that we’ve only held this property for about 40 days so far, we have to navigate the FHA rules for quick rehabs and flips. This will likely mean multiple appraisals, multiple FHA inspections, and providing a lot of rehab detail to the underwriters (receipts, invoices, etc).
Second, the property is in an area that has a lot of houses for sale, but not a tremendous number of recently sold houses that can be used as comps. This means we’re going to have to work extra hard to convince the appraisers to get the appraisals where we need them, and may even mean having to lower our sales price if the appraisals come in a little low. We’re willing to do that to a point, if necessary.
Anyway, the buyers have 7 days for inspections, and the mortgage broker is getting the loan paperwork underway. We hope to close this one in about 30 days if we don’t run into any insurmountable issues…
J,
Great work! especially in an area full of homes for sale. You and your wife are great inspirations to my wife and I. As matter of fact, your advice and website was very helpful in getting one of our investment properties sold in a very short time!
Thanks Mark (Arlington)
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Wow! You guys are amazing!! So you would attribute the fact that you got an offer when there are so many others for sale to the staging and that the house is move in ready? Obviously your house looks incredible. What do the other houses look like?
Hi Karen –
The two big things we’d attribute the quick offer to are the condition of the house (including what it looks like staged) and the price. We purposefully priced the house just below the prices of the bulk of the other houses in the neighborhood, so we knew that anyone who looked in that neighborhood would have to look at our house. And we also knew that while the other houses were probably move-in ready, they probably hadn’t been updated in years and certainly didn’t have new finishings like ours.
All-in-all, we were fairly confident that if we could find a buyer who was interested in living in the neighborhood and willing to pay in that price range, we could get an offer. Turns out we only had one showing all weekend, and that was the buyer who made the offer. So, it was good and bad…
I told you you were going to get it under contract 😉
FWIW, in my last sale, which was also FHA, the appraisers were very agreeable dudes and willing to work with me after they saw all the work I had done to the house. Hopefully yours will be the same.