My Real Estate Story

Jon • 20th Jun 2010 • news

This is the story of my first attempt at buying a place in the real estate market. While everyone was worried about the real estate market and how bad it had gotten, it lead to prices that I could actually afford, in an area I have always wanted to live. The ending of this story happened over 6 months ago, I feel it’s a good story that is still worth telling.

I was raised in Marin County, California from about 3 years old until I went to college. When I was young, Marin wasn’t the young happening place. So for college, I wanted to try something new and went to school in Oregon. My sophmore year in college, I realized that the San Francisco Bay Area was where I wanted to end up. At the time housing prices in the bay area were way beyond anything I would be able to afford for years after college. I made the decision that I was going to find a job in the bay area. In 2007 I found a job in the industry I loved and an apartment to rent a short drive away. It was a perfect start to my career that started only 5 days after graduating college.

Through 2008 the company I worked for was having a great year with major contracts being paid and the company could barely hire fast enough. My rent wasn’t increased even though I was on a month to month contract. Life was good. The year of 2008 passed and 2009 came into existence. Everyone could see the economy was on a downward spin. My parents and professionals all around kept saying to lay low, work hard and when the economy turns around, you’ll be better experienced and better off than when we entered the economic collapse. In early 2009, I made the decision to not only keep improving in my career but also look to enter the real estate market. Housing prices in the bay area were finally low enough, that I could afford a place in the bay area!

So one Saturday morning I woke up and decided that I was seriously going to look into buying my first piece of real estate. I have always been an advocate for home ownership. Once you get past the down payment…owning isn’t very expensive compared to renting. I walked out of my apartment towards the satellite office of Frank Howard Allen Real Estate. I walked in and met Judy LeMar. I expressed interest in buying a place in Marin County. She did a quick search on the MLS database and found some places that matched my criteria. My criteria was simple at the time. A minimum of two bedroom, 1 bath with a price tag of $180,000 or less. I talked to Judy about visiting some of these places, and we scheduled to go visiting the next day.

We went to a few places in a complex that was behind a strip mall. From the outside, you could smell Round Table Pizza baking their pizzas. The exterior of the place, which is controlled by the home owners association, had a lot of work that needed to be done. This lead to Judy expressing concern that the HOA could raise the monthly HOA fee to cover the costs. We also visited a unit that was very well kept inside and out and at that point I turned from interested to driven to own a place. Lastly we visited a complex which had units of the right size but I wasn’t too sure about the layout. The living room seemed too long to make it comfortable and usable. After visiting the places, I told Judy that before I did anything else, I would want to visit the places with one or both of my parents. She totally understood and asked to keep in touch via e-mail about scheduling.

I went to my parents with the MLS information on the places I had visited. They were excited for me and would love to visit the places with me. Judy was very kind and offered to show my Mom and I my favorite places one evening. While visiting my Mom found that the places that had the exterior not well maintained by the HOA, also didn’t feel like a good community. The complex with places that had weird layout to me (the long living room), my Mom liked a lot. Her main reason was that the layout could be dealt with and the exterior was big open space with well kept grass. I came around to agree with her.

I spent sometime thinking about my options and finally decided to try and make an offer on the one place I loved. The place that turned my interest into being driven. Sadly I was too late and the place had gone into contract. I was a little depressed and wasn’t sure if another place sprung my interest enough to make an offer. My parents pushed about how this is a unique opportunity to enter the market and not to let it pass.

A unit in the complex with the long living rooms was having it’s first open house. Before the open house, I went to Judy and made two (2) offers on units in the complex. One offer was on a place that my Mom & I visited with Judy, which will be referenced as the Lassen property from here on. The other was the one having it’s first open house in a few days, which will be referenced as the Tahoe property from here on. They were both short sales and the wait to hear back on a short sale offer was long enough, that making 2 offers wasn’t risky.

I took both my parents and my cousin George to the open house. We walked and looked around the outside of the Lassen property. Then we went to the open house for the Tahoe property. We realized then that the Tahoe property was unique because its windows from the living room didn’t look directly at another unit…it looked out along grass fields. It was the only unit in the complex with that type of view. It made it my favorite and now I was anxious to hear back on my offers.

The first week since making the offers past and Judy sent an e-mail to tell me that there was no news on either place. A few weeks had passed and we get the first signs that the Lassen property might be coming through. The bank managing the short sale requires me to sign some documents before the offer would be considered. I arrange with Judy to sign the documents over lunch. Judy also has me pre-sign a offer withdrawal for the Tahoe property just in case. Six days later, the real estate agent for the Lassen property says that more paperwork is being put together and the banks will be making a decision soon after.

Since the e-mail about the banks being close to making a decision, over a month has passed with still no final word on the offer. The two offers had a time limit of 60 days and now they were about to expire. The Tahoe property was in complete silence and Lassen was supposedly close to being accepted. I worked with Judy to extend the Lassen offer and we’ll forget about the Tahoe property.

Finally we get word that the reason the Lassen property was taking so long is because there are two lenders that have to agree to the offer. The first lender agreed to my offer and had made the generous offer of $10,000 to the second lender. The second lender wanted more and wouldn’t approve my offer without more. I told Judy that if the second lender wanted a reasonable amount, I would be okay with raising my offer by that amount. It turns out that the second lender wanted $100k out of a $172k offer. No way I was raising my offer by $100k.

Judy got word that the Tahoe property was actually making progress. They came back informing us that another offer had been made, but we should resubmit an offer that included $4,000 cash directly to a specific party. Judy and I scrambled to get the new offer out the door. There was a short period that Tahoe offer might be accepted. I got to the point where I was pissed and wanted to withdrawal my offers on both Lassen and Tahoe if nothing happened in the next 3 weeks. A few days later we learn that the Tahoe property is going into foreclosure.

On June 16th I get an e-mail from Judy informing me that my offer for the Lassen property had been accepted. The only catch was that they wanted to close by June 26th. I scrambled with the bank to try and get a mortgage put together in time. We we’re inching close to the finish line and then bad news struck. Someone (not Judy or myself) screwed up the HUD and it had to be accepted before the purchase of the Lassen property could go through. We we’re back in the waiting game.

While we inched very close to closing on the Lassen property, in the end the two lenders responsible for the short sale couldn’t agree and therefore I lost my opportunity at buying the Lassen property. After six (6) months of being through so much, I lost interest in doing a real estate search. While waiting for word back on the new HUD, I made an offer on a place going for dirt cheap and we never heard anything from them again.

I had lost the drive for home ownership after going through the short sale process. I kept an eye out for properties but everything in my price range was in short sale or foreclosure and I didn’t want to go through that again. Over a month had passed and I had nearly forgotten about the whole real estate thing when Judy wrote to me with the subject of “Look who’s back”. The Tahoe property was on the market again and this time was not a foreclosure or a short sale. My interest sparked again but with doubt that anything would happen.

The evening after Judy sent me the “Look who’s back” e-mail, I had a conversation with my parents about matching the asking price. It was listed at $189k and my original budget was $180k. With the $8,000 tax credit in effect until December, my parents and I agreed that I should not only offer $189k but also go for 20% down. The following day I met with Judy and made the offer. Someone else had made an offer on the Tahoe property. The agent was nice enough to hold off showing the other offer until we sent in mine. Judy and I put in the offer of matching the list price with 20% down payment. Except this offer expired at 5pm the next day.

At 9:14am the next day I get the e-mail I was hoping for. Judy writes “WE DID IT” and informs me that my offer had been accepted and I was in escrow! I worked with the bank to get the mortgage and everything squared away.

It was the day before the contract to close and the mortgage documents had not been printed. The bank was so backlogged that days had gone by and the docs were not printed yet. I wrote on my twitter account about how the bank needed to print my mortgage docs to make me a happy customer. Minutes later, I am on the phone with a nice lady at the bank explaining my situation. At lunch time I get an e-mail from the person spearheading my mortgage process at the bank. He informs me that he was told by his bosses boss told him to get in touch with me. His bosses boss is very high up in the corporate hierarchy at the bank. My tweet got the attention of people very high up at the bank.

At 1:16pm on the day before the contract to close, my mortgage docs arrived at the title company. I contacted the associate at the title company to schedule a time to sign. We agreed on 4:30pm that day. Signing the documents wasn’t as scary as I thought. I smiled and signed in happiness that I was buying the place that was my favorite after initially visiting it. The property officially became mine on the day my contract to close ended.

That evening I shared a bottle of champagne with my cousin George and Judy. It is then that I got the key to my newly purchased condo. After months of waiting and headache I was a homeowner. It is an experience I will never forget.