Selling our First Home

Well its official, Brent and I are in the process of selling our first home. It is of course bittersweet because we are ready to move on to bigger and better things but this is the home that Brent and I started our lives in, its the home Preston had his first bedroom and first birthday in and it holds so many more memories we cherish. We feel like now is the perfect time to sell although we don't have a new home to move into yet. We will more than likely do the move into an apartment thing and continue searching for our next home which will be a little inconvenient but we are ok with that.

Our house went live on Monday, Aug 6 around 3pm. We had a request to see the house that day but I kept missing the Ebby phone call to set up the appointment. So we didn't have any showings the first day but when the second day rolled around my phone was blowing up like crazy. By the end of the second day which was Tuesday, Aug 7, we had 16 showings throughout the day. I was shocked to say the least that, that may people were so quick to come and see our house. By the end of the day, we had 2 full price offers with no concessions and 1 offer above asking price. After a little counter offerings back and forth, we finally settled on going with the 'Doctor" offer because he ended up offering $222,100, no concessions, $5000 earnest money and willing to come to the table with the difference between the appraised value and the offer price. We had an offer of $227,000 but in the end the "Doctor" offer was better because he had to ability to do a long lease back to us which was very appealing to us considering we still haven't found our next home yet. This would prevent us from having to put our stuff in storage, move into an apartment and then move again once we found our new home. The $227,000 offer needed to be in our house by mid Sept which was a little too quick for our needs.

So, now we are in the 7 day option period and that ends on  Saturday, Aug 17. The buyers had an inspection done but asked if they could come back for another inspection a few days later because they weren't happy with their first inspection results for some reason. Now the second inspection results have come in and it doesn't look good. The buyers are having second thoughts about buying our home. I really don't know what could be that bad about our house unless the foundation is worse than we thought. We have cracks but not more than any other home in Texas. The option period ends tomorrow and we haven't yet heard what the buyers wants to do. We don't know if he is going to walk away all together or come back with a lower offer price. We should have the final results of this contract by tomorrow. I am praying and hoping we can get it worked out because I am not looking forward to starting this process all over again.

So my fears came true and our buyers backed out completely without even countering so now we are moving forward with our backup offer. This offer is $222,000 as well with a 60 day lease back option with a close date of mid-September. So basically the exact same offer as before which is good considering this is our second go-round.

Our new buyers waited until the second day before their option period was up to even have their inspector come out now they are wanting to extend the option period because they are worried about the foundation due to the inspection report. We don't want to extend the option because we don't want them to get a structural engineer out because he might scare them off like our first buyers. So we offered $5,000 off and we move forward with closing. The buyers didn't feel comfortable with that so they refused the $5000 off and have stayed with the $222,000 and we are allowing them to extend the option. If they don't find anything, then they might have shot themselves in the foot because we won't be giving them $5000 now if nothing comes up on the foundation.

To settle our fears, we reluctantly had a foundation guy come out to let us know if we do indeed have foundation issues or not and to our luck, he said our foundation was within standards and no foundation work needed to be done. Thank goodness!! He did say we had movement and we were close to needing a little bit of work but we were still meeting the standards. Now we just have to wait to see what the buyers foundation guy says, hopefully the same as ours!!

So, we just heard and the buyers foundation guy said the house needed 13 piers and would cost about $5,700. WHAT! How can 2 reports be soo different. So now, the buyers want us to fix the foundation, replace 9 windows, fix the heater, spray for carpenter ants, fix the fence and fix the wood rot on the outside windows. Luckily for us, we have ground to stand on in terms of the foundation. So, to make the deal happen, we are offering them $3,000 to use as they please to fix all the problems they found. We don't want to pay anything for foundation because we have a report that says it is fine but we are giving them a little just to help the deal move along. Plus we are giving them a $500 home warranty and will have our home warranty come out to spray for ants and fix the heater. They were not completely happy with this as they want the full $5000 so both realtors are giving $400 of their commission to help close the gap.

I thought the deal was done but now the buyers are saying we always agreed to the $5000 and they don't think the $3500 is enough. I am about sick and tired of dealing with this. Who knows if this deal will ever close. We are 4 days past the end of their option and still a contract has not been signed by all of us yet. To us, if they don't close, we should be entitled the $5000 earnest money. Brent wanted to change the wording on the home warranty part so now we are waiting to see if the buyers agree to the new wording. We'll see...

Good news!!! The buyers agreed to our hardball of $3500 with the lease back and new wording on the home warranty items that need to be fixed. I couldn't believe it when Brent said they accepted. I was soo happy and sad at the same time because now it was pretty much final and we are officially moving. Now its onto finding our new home!!

4429 Early Morn Drive

Plano, TX 75093