Step 4 - The Offer

After a lot of thought over the past couple days, Jeff and I decided this is the perfect house for us:

The house was built in 2006 and it is 2500 sq ft with 4 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. It has a great garage for Jeff and enough space for an office AND a man cave! The master bath has 2 SINKS!!! and a walk in closet that both of us can fit in at the same time. I'm a little excited if you can't tell.

Before we decided what to offer, we had a couple more questions...we needed to find out the average price per sq foot of other houses that have sold in the neighborhood. We also wanted to know who holds the loans on the house, how much the original owners paid, and how much they owe???

Our realtor called on Tuesday afternoon saying that someone else had just put in an offer on the house. She said she had told the seller's agent to expect another offer from us and she came over that night to go over all the paperwork. It took almost an hour for us to go over everything and then we had to decide what to offer. This house is a short sale listed at $189,000. We knew if we wanted our offer to be competitive against the other we needed to offer a little more. We finally decided on an amount, the down payment and the earnest money amount and signed the papers.

Wednesday, I was an anxious mess all day. The realtor called a couple times to verify some things in the documentation and then she called  back to say she thought we had the stronger offer. Well...it wasn't until 8:30pm that she called with the good news.

THEY ACCEPTED OUR OFFER!!!

So whats next? Well a short sale is a bit different from a regular sale. The banks that hold the mortgages have to approve the offer next because they will be taking a loss on the house. This part could take up 4 months. The bank is saying 30 to 45 days for one mortgage but this house has two. So...keep your fingers crossed for us. Hopefully we'll be having a house warming party in January.