For those of you who didn't know, I used to be a real estate agent. I did it for about 2 years with my last closing being about 3 weeks before Evan was born. I tried to get back into it when he was about 4 months old, but it was just too much to handle. Since we weren't crunched for income, I decided to give it up.
We've been in our house for 5 years now and knew it wouldn't be the house that we grew old in. We decided that this was the year for a change. Now that we have 2 kids, and with Jack self employed and working from home we have grown into the house. We don't have a guest room now, but have several guests during the year. And we don't really have a back yard but we have a very active Evan, and Liam will be next year!
So in mid-May we started a hunt for a 4-bedroom +office with a back yard. Seems like an easy enough request, right? Well the first house we looked at, we fell in love with. I had been following it online for 3 months while we were getting our own house ready for the market. Wouldn't you know it got a contract on it the same day we saw it. 12 more houses and nothing seemed quite right for us. Then there was Lucky #14 (last time we house hunted when we bought our house, we looked at 14 houses). It was way overpriced and new on the market so if we had any hope of getting it for a decent price, we had to wait until we had an offer on our house. So we waited, and waited. We got a contingent offer (our buyers had a house to sell) but in the meantime, so did Lucky #14. Their agent didn't seem too confident in the salability of the other buyers' house, so we decided to keep waiting until we had a non-contingent contract before we tried to compete. (these contingency contracts leave the house open to secondary offers)
In the midst of all this house hunting, we listed our own home For Sale By Owner (FSBO or as we agents call it Fizbo). I was an agent for 2 years but I actually never had my own listing before. I had only worked with buyers. So a lot of this was new to me and I was thrown into the deep end without an office full of agents to turn to. Aside from the incompetency of Housepad (the company that gets FSBO's up on the MLS - Multiple Listing Service so that agents can find it), it really wasn't too overwhelming to take on ourselves. 7 weeks, 38 showings, 100+ flyers, a contingent offer and a non-contingent offer and while the details are still being sorted by the attorneys at the moment it looks like we finally have our buyer.
We were so excited to move forward on buying our house, but were heartbroken to find out that the other buyers' house had indeed gotten a contract and was set to close today. There was no way we could beat that when our contracts are still being sorted by the attorneys.
So here we are, selling our house with a closing date of September 14 and no where to move to yet. I know we won't be homeless and I'm trusting God that neither of the houses we fell in love with we're the right ones for us, and He has the perfect one out there. I know we have family and friends we can turn to, and we can always get a short term rental if necessary. While not ideal, we will at least have a roof over our heads and warm beds for our kids. So if you think of it, please pray for our anxiety and that God would line up the perfect living arrangement for us, however it will work out!
