After all the craziness this week with the woman negotiating for The DIY House, I thought there was very little chance that we’d ever get to a final contract. She obviously was having cold feet (understandable for a first-time buyer), and I wasn’t sure if there was anything we — or her agent — could do to overcome her hesitancy. After one final push yesterday — my wife and I spent three hours putting together documentation on all the work that was done on the house, the comps in the neighborhood, etc to help her feel more comfortable — she apparently decided she was ready to move forward, and we got a signed contract early this afternoon.
It’s a very decent offer — about 95% of asking price, with us providing 3% in seller-paid closing costs and some of the staging furniture thrown in. The best part is that there is no due diligence period, so we don’t have to worry about her getting cold feet again, or coming back to ask for more concessions. At this point, if she decides to back out for any reason, we can keep her earnest money deposit. And because she chose not to use our lender, we insisted that her deposit was 1.5% of the purchase price (nearly $2000). Hopefully, that’s enough incentive to get her to see this through to closing.
All-in-all, she’s getting a great house at a fantastic price (about 10-15% below market from our analysis), so I don’t expect her to have any regrets once she moves in. Closing is scheduled for late-April, and if her lender can push through the VA loan faster than that, I’ll push for an even earlier closing.
House #3 Update:
In other good news, we got a call today from the previous Second Chance House buyers — the ones who lied to us about their credit and ultimately terminated their contract. They called my wife today to tell her that they finally were cleared for their loan, could close in three days, and wanted to know if the house was still available!
After having them send us an obnoxious email last week telling us that they wouldn’t put up any additional earnest money because “the house will still be on the market whenever we’re ready to close,” my wife took great satisfaction in letting them know that the house was already under contract again, for full price.
Almost makes me want to believe in karma…
🙂
There is nothing better than being able to sit back and watch someone get exactly what’s coming to them – especially when you do NOTHING but be the good guy and go out of your way to make things easy for everyone else and they still do it to themselves… It just proves that if you do the right thing, put out a good product and make sure that everyone walks away happy; good things will happen… I for one like to call that karma
Good deal that the one buyer decided to sign the contract.
And I absolutely love what happened with the other buyers – nothing like a good “zing” to brighten up the day. LOL
That’s awesome.
Nothing like a healthy dose of good ol’ karma.
🙂
Great news. Again I urge you to make sure they have in their VA application asap. Get the ball rolling in that court because the VA is no different then any other Govt program, they move about as fast a geo in a snowstorm.
8 houses and your not even through 1 year. But no, this is a buyers market, houses aren’t moving. Ha! I love it.
Booya baby, BOO YAAAAAAaaaaaa.
Bilge –
It sounds like their lender is trying to do a new “10 Day VA Loan” thing, where they can supposedly push through the loan approval and the closing in 10 days!??!
Do you know anything about this? I’ve never heard of it before…
We’ll definitely get on the phone with the lender and make sure they’re on top of things…and I’ll probably shoot you an email separately to get some more ideas and feedback.
Thanks!