We Bought a House!

Tara and I are happy to say that we have bought our first home! We have been looking to buy a house for about a year now and finally decided on this one. House hunting was an up and down journey for us with some disappointment, but we are happy that things worked out.

Our First Offer

It started with us finding a home that we really liked on just our 2nd home visit. We put an offer on the home, but were outbid. This was a little hard for us, but was a really good learning experience. The other offer was supposedly a “cash offer” that was bogus. That offer fell through once they couldn’t get financing and it fell to us to put it under contract. We decided to go take one more look at the house before we decided. While there, Tara and I both got a feeling that this wasn’t the right house for us. It was weird having something we wanted, but not having it work out. We felt disappointed, but relieved at the same time. The house hunt continued.

Accelerated Offer

The next home we made an offer on came a few weeks later. This home we really liked, but weren’t totally sold on. I actually bonked my head really hard going up the stairs, so there were things that weren’t ideal, but we figured we could live with it at the right price. Our realtor suggested that we make a lower offer, but give an accelerated offer. This meant that we would counter offer the highest bidder $1,000 over their asking price. We figured that it would give us the opportunity to have the last word on the house. A little bit of time passed by before we got a call saying that there was another offer for 25k over what the asking price was. We didn’t want to pay that much, so we had to turn down our accelerated offer. We were really surprised that someone had offered that much over asking price, but realized that it was how the market was in Utah at the time. The hunt continued

A few months pass

After that offer we had a few months where we didn’t find anything that matched our interests. Everything seemed to be out of our price range or not our style. We felt a little dismayed, but hopeful that something would eventually should up. During that time, I had noticed a house on the market that had pretty much everything we wanted in a home, but was, in my mind, overpriced. I saved it to my favorites list and decided that I would check back in a week or two. I had forgotten about it for a month before I stumbled on it again; it was still listed. The market had seemed to cool down a bit and no one had made an offer. I called our realtor and we went and saw it.

Our new home

The first walk through of the home didn’t impress us all that much, but once we started to brainstorm between ourselves and our realtor, we saw the potential of what we could do. Because the house had been listed for a month, we figured we could offer lower than asking price and have a good chance of getting it. We offered 25k less than asking price, a $500 home warranty paid by the seller AND 6k paid in closing costs. It took a few days, but they finally accepted our offer! We were so excited that we finally got what we were looking for.

We were extremely lucky to have an incredible realtor, Lisa. She knew exactly what we were looking for and did her best to get us what we wanted and how we wanted it. We highly recommend finding a realtor that puts your best interests first. It made a huge difference for us, especially in negotiating everything with the seller’s agent.

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