We had our house on the market for about 9 months by owner. We weren't getting any movement, so we decided to contact a realtor. After speaking to a few, we decided to go with someone we knew from church. We originally listed the house for $274,900, knowing we would probably get a little less than that and would have to cover realtor expenses as well. At this point, though, we just wanted to get out of the house. I also believe that God had a purpose in us losing money on the house. Doing things contrary to God's plan carries consequences and getting into so much debt was not going to be relieved easily. Had we been able to sell the house and cover all the debt, I guarantee we would have learned nothing from the situation and would carry the same bad habits that got us into that spot in the first place.
We listed it with the realtor in Sept. Even with a realtor and the house being listed on the MLS, we were getting few calls/showings. In mid-December, our realtor talked to us about lowering our asking price. We already knew we were going to have a short sale and didn't want to go further in the whole; fully expecting that we would not get our asking price. We prayed and didn't know what to do. We still felt like God had led us to sell our house. We decided to take our house off the market until spring time. We hoped the housing market would rebound a little and prospects would be better in the spring. We called our realtor on a Wed and told her. She asked if she could leave the listing up until Sunday and then she would remove it. We had nothing to lose at that point, so we said sure.
Friday evening we got a call. Someone wanted to see the house. She asked if it would be okay to bring them out on Saturday. I was thinking, you've got to be kidding! We haven't had any showings in a while and now the day before we take it off the market, someone wants to see it. Of course we said sure.
The family came to see the house. The father was a fireman and they had two small children. We were already kind of surprised at how this was going. We again just prayed for God's will.
Sunday, our realtor called and said the couple wanted to put a bid in on the house. SERIOUSLY?? She was serious. She said their realtor was going to fax it over. She headed out to our house with the bid. $264,000. Ouch! Quick calculation in my head, already $10K down plus 7% realtor fee, yada, yada, yada.
Oh, I should probably share how a short sale wasn't possible a few posts ago and now we were considering it. Let's just say that some people that love us very much offered to loan us money to bring to the table. We would be completely indebted to them. They also understood God's call and what our future plans were (which I'll get into a little more in the next post).
Anyway, that bid just felt so low. We wanted to counter bid to at least recover a little bit of our loss. Our realtor made the call back to their realtor. After a few minutes they called back and said they needed a few days to think about it. She hung up the phone and shared the news. Oh man! This close and now what? The reality is that they could have placed another bid on another house and we would have been out in the cold. I made a few calls to gather some wise counsel. I don't know if they were trying to get us to play chicken, but it worked, we budged first. After about 1/2 hour, we had our realtor call back and accept their bid. Whew! What a relief. In hindsight, THAT WAS GOD!! After seeing what the housing market did, what a blessing to be out from under that burden. I can almost guarantee we would have foreclosed on that house if we still owned it!! Plus the fact that we were going to take it off the market THAT DAY!!!
It still amazes me and this was just the beginning!!!! HE amazes me and this was just the beginning!
No comments:
Post a Comment