The Rest of the Story

WARNING:

This is going to be long, with no pictures, but I wanted to get our house-hunting experience written down so that we don't forget how much the Lord has blessed us in this journey. I feel that the best way to document it is to write it out in a timeline, so here goes.

The day after Thanksgiving, 2010 - This is the day we met our realtor, Ken Pozek. Since we were going up to Michigan to spend Thanksgiving with our friends, the Palmers, we thought we would take the opportunity to see a few homes in the area. Obviously, we weren't ready to make any offers at this point, but we just wanted to see what the homes felt like. We emailed four realtors, and only one realtor, Ken, answered back, probably because we were still four months out from being serious buyers. He gladly showed us the home we were interested in, and stayed in contact with us after we left. We ended up choosing him as our realtor and he has been AWESOME!

Mon-Tue, March 7-8 - After months of browsing homes on the internet we are finally in a position to start seriously looking, so we took a trip up to Michigan at the begining of Jared's Spring Break. Our friends, Ben and Sarah Palmer, graciously let us stay with them. We knew we wanted to keep our mortgage under $220K, so we sent Ken our price range, and several homes that we had seen on the internet, and he showed us the ones we had chosen that were still available and also a few more that seemed to fit our criteria. Over the two days, we saw about 15 homes, and though some of them we liked, we just didn't feel that we were ready to chose one of them yet.

We came home from that trip a little disheartened, so Maryle sat down at the computer and started looking again. She had the feeling that she should look in the same city that Jared would be working in, as we hadn't yet been looking in that town, because it wasn't the fabulous city of Troy that we had wanted to live in. As she started looking, she saw a great neighborhood that was only 1/2 mile away from Jared's future work, and the homes looked beautiful. We decided that we would try to look in that neighborhood the next time we were able to go up.

Saturday, March 12 - Maryle flies to Arizona to spend a week with her sister, JoDee, who is having a baby. More on that in a future post.

Tuesday, March 15th - Jared drives up to Michigan (still on his Spring Break) with the kids to check out this new neighborhood.

Wednesday, March 16 - Jared goes with Ken to see the homes. He is able to see three homes, and really liked one of them. He called Maryle (who is still in AZ) to tell her all about it, and sent her pictures. Then Jared headed back to Indiana. Later that evening we decided to go ahead and make an offer on the one Jared liked.

Thursday, March 17th - Our offer went in on the home this morning. Jared, back in Indiana, happened to look online again for homes in the same area. He noticed a foreclosure that had just popped up that day with only four pictures. It was larger than the first home, and looked nicer. He alerted Ken, who promptly went a half hour out of his way to take pictures and describe the home to Jared. He also informed Jared that there were 2 other people looking at the home at that same time.

Friday, March 18th - Knowing the market was really picking up, Jared gave the go-ahead (without the permission of Maryle) to make an offer on this second home. Jared went out on a limb, realizing that he could potentially be grounded for a month for not asking permission to write up an offer (Jared is writing this, by the way:)). We also learned that day that the first home recieved a total of four offers so the bank said to come back with our biggest and best offer by today at five. This we did. So, at this point, we have put in two offers, one on a home that only Jared has seen, and one on a home that neither of us had seen. Looking back, that seems absolutely crazy, but at the time, it seemed the thing to do.

Saturday, March 19th - Maryle comes home from AZ.

Monday, March 21st - Ken  informs us that we were one of two finalists for the first home and the bank countered our offer. However, we were still waiting for word on the second home, so we decided to wait to give an answer to the bank.

Tuesday, March 22nd - We got a call from Ken this morning, and he informed us that there were SIX offers on the second larger home and there were three offers that were higher than ours! We concluded that the larger home was completely out of reach. We accepted the counter offer on the first home and were told that the other finalist had countered the counter offer. Therefore, the first home was ours! Then, unexpectedly, we got a call from Ken about 6:30 p.m. that evening saying that the bank had accepted our offer on the second home! We were in disbelief! Basically, what happened is that the three higher offers had bid above the appraisal price (nobody knew what that was) and the bank didn't want to deal with the home not appraising for the higher price. We had to answer back by Wednesday at noon. We had never seen the second home in person, so within an hour, we were off to Michigan and got there at a quarter after one in the morning.

Wednesday, March 23rd - We went with our realtor to see the bigger home and were absolutely stunned. Not only was it the highest quality home that we had seen, it was also the lowest price. More will be explained in a minute. We were absolutely blown away by what we saw, and never dreamed that we'd potentially own a home like this, even ten years down the road. The amazing thing is, there were TEN total offers on the two homes combined, and we had our offers accepted on both. The Lord is incredible! He gave us the chance to choose which home we wanted, which was especially nice since Maryle hadn't seen either home. It must be Maryle that is blessing our family because it sure isn't Jared :) (again, Jared is writing this). We chose the bigger home as it was actually cheaper than the smaller one, and we liked the overall feel and layout better.

The bigger home was built in 2006 and originally sold for $356K. It listed at $173,300! (The smaller home was listed at $199,900.) By the recommendation of Ken, we bid $184K (higher than the asking price) with $4K back on the bigger home, and the appraisal as-is came in at $189K before the bank put it on the market. Needless to say, we are still in shock and are extremely humbled at how much the Lord has blessed us. Now we are praying for the financing to go through.

A big thanks goes out to Ben and Sarah, who opened their home to us for each trip, and gave us their advice all along the way. You guys are AMAZING!