To recap: we found a house we liked on Thursday, and put an offer in on Friday with a 48-hour irrevocability (Google is underlining that word for me in red, informing me politely that "irrevocability" is, in fact, not a word, and perhaps I'd like to try "irreconcilability" instead. I would not, but thank you, Google).
Our agent is away for the weekend. His mother, however, is a superstar real estate agent, so he left us in her very capable hands. We got a call from her this afternoon on our way to the Jays game. She let us know that our offer had been received, and to hang tight.
And hung tight we did.
It was probably around the 4th or 5th inning of the game when she called. Jon spoke to her, but let me know almost instantly that "it's not good news".
Another offer had been placed. Surprise, surprise. We'd been through this before on the first house we tried to buy. Agents will call around to all the other agents that have shown the house, informing them that an offer has been registered in an effort to encourage others to put their offers in.
Competition is a beautiful thing in the real estate world. Not so much in my world.
Anyway, Jon talked to our acting agent about price, and our flexibility around the closing date. The house is vacant. We're on a month-to-month deal in our apartment. We can get the hell out of here whenever works for the seller.
You want to sell your house to us...we are good buyers...you like us...you want to sell your house to us...
(That mantra may or may not have been telepathically delivered to the sellers by me...)
Apparently, there was still a baseball game going on. I couldn't concentrate because I felt like I was either a) going to throw up; b) pass out; or c) all of the above.
The game was tied. Still no word.
(This all sounds so made up.)
Our agent called. We got it. And we didn't even have to raise our initial price.
I still can't believe it, and probably won't until we've lived there for at least a year. We have conditions we need to clear, so it's not ours yet. Hopefully we'll have a better idea about what's going on by the end of the week.
So it's great. We're really close. I have to say, though, the best part of this was the way Jon and I came together while we were waiting to hear whether we had the house. I've mentioned before how stressful this has all been. It can challenge even the strongest relationship (in my opinion). People kept saying to us that there was a reason we hadn't got the houses we put offers in on before, and maybe part of that was we hadn't had the opportunity to be together when we finally hear about it, hadn't had the opportunity to wait together and feel that anxiety and butterflies-in-the-belly feeling that we were both experiencing.
It was very uniting, and solidified by belief that there's no one else in the world I'd rather be going through all of this with than Jon (regardless of the outcome).
And so, dear readers, this is truly a positive post. It seems as though we've bought our first home, and I'm so confident it's going to be filled with lots and lots of love.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Here we go again...
After taking some time off from the house search (consciously or unconsciously, I'm not sure), we went out again last night to look at some places. Our initial list of houses we wanted to see consisted of 8 homes. Our agent contacted the appropriate agents, to report back to us that 3 of the homes we wanted to see had already been sold. Coincidentally, all 3 were the houses I was really interested in.
Needless to say, I wasn't feeling overly positive about the outing.
We had 4 houses confirmed for our viewing, and were awaiting the 5th. When we met our agent, he told us the 5th had also been sold, conditionally. It was more than a little depressing to watch him physically cross out the homes we wouldn't be seeing because we'd missed the boat on them.
The ride over to the houses was pretty silent. Whether it was my pessimism at what was to come or my "summer fog" (a result of throwing my schedule away during summer holidays--I know, I have it so hard...), I'm not sure I said more than 5 words. I made a comment to Jon as we walked out of our house that we should have kept a video of us walking to our agent's car for the first round of looking at homes, and then comparing it to the misery our faces were surely showing as we walked to his car last night. Our usual house-looking accouterments (tape measure, pad of paper) seemed embarrassingly hopeful to me, and I asked Jon why we even needed them (we never used them, anyway).
But we brought them along.
The first house we saw was...alright. It had some nice character details (stained glass feature windows, original baseboards and trim), but the kitchen was tiny. Our agent informed us that offers were being accepted that night at 8:00, but that no offers had been registered when he had called in the morning. I temporarily overlooked the unusable kitchen at the possibility of actually not being in competition. Jon noticed quickly that there was no possibility of parking, and that we couldn't access the backyard except by going through the house.
"Here we go again", I thought. Jon's much better at pointing out the faults with a house than I am. While I'm so thankful he's much more practical than I am, I'll admit it sometimes drives me slightly crazy that he can't look beyond certain (incredibly important) things.
He was totally right, though. There wasn't even street parking, so I accepted that this wasn't the house for us, despite it's potential availability.
So we went to see the next house. It was at the upper end of our budget, but it had the possibility of a basement apartment. The house had good bones, but it needed a lot of work. It had a sunroom-type room off the back, making the dining room/living room kind of tiny. The bathroom was really small, as well. We've seen enough houses in Toronto to be realistic about bathroom size. We know we're not going to have a separate soaker tub and shower, but this one didn't even have a bathtub, just a shower stall.
No thanks.
The next we saw was sort of hilarious, and was probably good for us to see, if only to provide a much needed laugh. It was listed at the top of our budget. The three bedroom house had been completely gutted, and people had clearly begun a remodel job and then ran out of money. All of the tiles (expensive ones, too), toilets, bathtubs, etc., were lying around (and were part of the purchase of the house). The idea was, you buy the house, use the materials, and finish off the job.
They had thought to put two ensuite bathrooms in two of the three bedrooms (rough-ins for the bathrooms). Great idea, as it's nearly impossible to find a house with an ensuite.
However...there was no main bathroom. You'd have to go through one of the bedrooms to get to a bathroom.
This is a bad idea. Baaaaaaad idea, potential home renovators.
Jon noticed they had soldered the pipes without guarding the wood behind the pipes, so there were big burn marks around the soldering sites. Awesome. They had also sawed out a huge chunk from a support beam to (I guess) have a pipe running across it.
Mike Holmes would have had a field day.
The last house we saw felt good as soon as we stepped in it. Beautiful leaded glass and stained glass feature windows, originial hardwood trim and baseboards and staircase. The flow of the house was great, and we were happy with how wide the house felt (25'--crazy huge in Toronto standards). The kitchen was kind of a butt. Something felt like it was missing as I looked around it...then I kept walking and realised the kitchen had been split into two parts, with the stove and dishwasher on one side of the wall, and the fridge and a huge eating area on the other side. This would pose a problem for some, but not for us, with Super Handyman Jon at the helm.
I won't go through the whole detail of the house (hopefully I can post pictures after it becomes ours), but it had so much of what we're looking for.
So is this a positive post? Could it be?
We've put in our offer. I'll let you know how it goes within 48 hours when our offer expires.
Fingers crossed, folks, fingers crossed...
Needless to say, I wasn't feeling overly positive about the outing.
We had 4 houses confirmed for our viewing, and were awaiting the 5th. When we met our agent, he told us the 5th had also been sold, conditionally. It was more than a little depressing to watch him physically cross out the homes we wouldn't be seeing because we'd missed the boat on them.
The ride over to the houses was pretty silent. Whether it was my pessimism at what was to come or my "summer fog" (a result of throwing my schedule away during summer holidays--I know, I have it so hard...), I'm not sure I said more than 5 words. I made a comment to Jon as we walked out of our house that we should have kept a video of us walking to our agent's car for the first round of looking at homes, and then comparing it to the misery our faces were surely showing as we walked to his car last night. Our usual house-looking accouterments (tape measure, pad of paper) seemed embarrassingly hopeful to me, and I asked Jon why we even needed them (we never used them, anyway).
But we brought them along.
The first house we saw was...alright. It had some nice character details (stained glass feature windows, original baseboards and trim), but the kitchen was tiny. Our agent informed us that offers were being accepted that night at 8:00, but that no offers had been registered when he had called in the morning. I temporarily overlooked the unusable kitchen at the possibility of actually not being in competition. Jon noticed quickly that there was no possibility of parking, and that we couldn't access the backyard except by going through the house.
"Here we go again", I thought. Jon's much better at pointing out the faults with a house than I am. While I'm so thankful he's much more practical than I am, I'll admit it sometimes drives me slightly crazy that he can't look beyond certain (incredibly important) things.
He was totally right, though. There wasn't even street parking, so I accepted that this wasn't the house for us, despite it's potential availability.
So we went to see the next house. It was at the upper end of our budget, but it had the possibility of a basement apartment. The house had good bones, but it needed a lot of work. It had a sunroom-type room off the back, making the dining room/living room kind of tiny. The bathroom was really small, as well. We've seen enough houses in Toronto to be realistic about bathroom size. We know we're not going to have a separate soaker tub and shower, but this one didn't even have a bathtub, just a shower stall.
No thanks.
The next we saw was sort of hilarious, and was probably good for us to see, if only to provide a much needed laugh. It was listed at the top of our budget. The three bedroom house had been completely gutted, and people had clearly begun a remodel job and then ran out of money. All of the tiles (expensive ones, too), toilets, bathtubs, etc., were lying around (and were part of the purchase of the house). The idea was, you buy the house, use the materials, and finish off the job.
They had thought to put two ensuite bathrooms in two of the three bedrooms (rough-ins for the bathrooms). Great idea, as it's nearly impossible to find a house with an ensuite.
However...there was no main bathroom. You'd have to go through one of the bedrooms to get to a bathroom.
This is a bad idea. Baaaaaaad idea, potential home renovators.
Jon noticed they had soldered the pipes without guarding the wood behind the pipes, so there were big burn marks around the soldering sites. Awesome. They had also sawed out a huge chunk from a support beam to (I guess) have a pipe running across it.
Mike Holmes would have had a field day.
The last house we saw felt good as soon as we stepped in it. Beautiful leaded glass and stained glass feature windows, originial hardwood trim and baseboards and staircase. The flow of the house was great, and we were happy with how wide the house felt (25'--crazy huge in Toronto standards). The kitchen was kind of a butt. Something felt like it was missing as I looked around it...then I kept walking and realised the kitchen had been split into two parts, with the stove and dishwasher on one side of the wall, and the fridge and a huge eating area on the other side. This would pose a problem for some, but not for us, with Super Handyman Jon at the helm.
I won't go through the whole detail of the house (hopefully I can post pictures after it becomes ours), but it had so much of what we're looking for.
So is this a positive post? Could it be?
We've put in our offer. I'll let you know how it goes within 48 hours when our offer expires.
Fingers crossed, folks, fingers crossed...
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Expanding Our Search and Setting Timelines
Watched "Property Virgins" tonight. It must have been an old episode, as the couple didn't want to go past $300,000.
Ha.
Sandra (the host) said they would need to focus their search if they didn't want to be looking at houses for a year. Oh dear...
Here's what's happening with our property virginity:
Jon heard from a friend that Kipling and Lakeshore was a great area. Toronto Life says it's one of the new up and coming neighborhoods. We took a ride on the motorbike yesterday to check it out.
Mimico has some fabulous old homes, with really lovely neighborhoods. That area could easily be "The Beach"-y, with the help of some cute (and brave) boutiques. It's so far from the city, though, so I think we've ruled it out.
We've set up some timelines for ourselves out of my fear that we're going to be looking forever, and continue to be priced further and further out of the market. We're planning on giving our notice at our current apartment at the end of August if we haven't found a home to make coming home feeling defeated a little easier to take, knowing we're at least coming back to a nice apartment. We've also given Toronto 3 years--if we haven't bought a house in 3 years, we're getting the hell out of the city.
Timelines are really important to me, as they give me some sense of control over the whole thing. I think it's really easy to lose sense of time while looking for your first house. For me, it's been helpful to know that we have some semblance of a plan, and that we're on the same page in terms of what we want, and by when.
Ha.
Sandra (the host) said they would need to focus their search if they didn't want to be looking at houses for a year. Oh dear...
Here's what's happening with our property virginity:
Jon heard from a friend that Kipling and Lakeshore was a great area. Toronto Life says it's one of the new up and coming neighborhoods. We took a ride on the motorbike yesterday to check it out.
Mimico has some fabulous old homes, with really lovely neighborhoods. That area could easily be "The Beach"-y, with the help of some cute (and brave) boutiques. It's so far from the city, though, so I think we've ruled it out.
We've set up some timelines for ourselves out of my fear that we're going to be looking forever, and continue to be priced further and further out of the market. We're planning on giving our notice at our current apartment at the end of August if we haven't found a home to make coming home feeling defeated a little easier to take, knowing we're at least coming back to a nice apartment. We've also given Toronto 3 years--if we haven't bought a house in 3 years, we're getting the hell out of the city.
Timelines are really important to me, as they give me some sense of control over the whole thing. I think it's really easy to lose sense of time while looking for your first house. For me, it's been helpful to know that we have some semblance of a plan, and that we're on the same page in terms of what we want, and by when.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
The Search Continues to Begin
As I was reaching for the handle of the car door, Jon put his arms on the top of the car.
"We should make a movie of our search, so when we actually have a house, we can watch it and laugh and laugh and laugh! It's too bad we can't bring video cameras into these places".
No, we couldn't make a movie, but we could write blog.
But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.
So here's who we are: Vanessa and Jon, both newly 30, and, it would seem, destined to be eternal renters living in Toronto. I'm a teacher, and Jon's an engineer. We've been pre-approved for a mortgage for a little over a year now, which is when we started looking for a house.
It would seem, despite a rather healthy combined income, that we can't afford a starter house in Toronto.
Our story so far is that we've put offers in on 3 houses: the first in August of last year (2008), and the other two were made in the same week in June of this year (2009). Our first offer was rejected, with the seller walking away from all offers and taking the house off the market. We learned from a house we wanted to put an offer in on that we didn't have a chance, as we had a home inspection condition in our offer. Apparently, people are now doing home inspections prior to submitting an offer. When we heard the house went for $50,000 over asking, we realised we were in a much different market than we'd been in before. We both felt totally frustrated with the situation, and vowed we wouldn't be paying for a home inspection before we even knew if we had a chance at a house. It seemed insane to use that we would be using money we'd normally be saving to put towards the house just to try to get in the game.
I swore a lot. I cursed the bloody, selfish fools who first thought of the asinine idea of spending $400 on the effing home inspection before putting in an offer. Didn't they realise the precedent they were setting? Great for them for getting ahead, but didn't they think about everyone else they were screwing over?
The rantings of a mad woman, I realise.
This is what house hunting in Toronto does to you, though. It is not for the faint of heart.
I got off track.
Where was I?
Oh right. Home inspections. So we knew a little bit more now, though, and when we saw a house we thought was cute, we sucked it up and shelled out. We became one of "them": those self-centered asses who would do anything to screw everyone else for the sake of a house. I felt so smug as we sat there, discussing the result of the home inspection with the inspector as another couple looked around the house with their agent.
We were so far ahead.
Right?
Wrong. Our offer was clean, but we couldn't afford the house at $50,000 more than asking, which is what it ended up going for.
The last house we put an offer in on is still too painful to talk about. Maybe we'll write about that one next time.
This process has been frustrating, more than a little heartbreaking, and just plain hard. It's hard to feel such lack of control over such a major purchase. I guess going into this, neither of us thought finding our first house was going to go like this. Maybe we were naïve in thinking we'd look at a couple of houses, feel that "this is the one" feeling, and be done with it.
We argue more than we've ever argued. There's tension sometimes that's never existed before. The stress of finding our house has certainly been taking its toll.
So we're writing this blog to try to make sense of the process, of maybe trying to gain some perspective and insight into this ridiculous roller coaster we're on. Maybe it's an attempt to try to feel somewhat in control.
Is our plight any different from any other first-time home buyers in Toronto? Probably not. Maybe this blog can help make others feel like there is still community, even in such a ridiculously competitive housing market like the one we're currently experiencing.
We know what it's like. Maybe you do, too.
"We should make a movie of our search, so when we actually have a house, we can watch it and laugh and laugh and laugh! It's too bad we can't bring video cameras into these places".
No, we couldn't make a movie, but we could write blog.
But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.
So here's who we are: Vanessa and Jon, both newly 30, and, it would seem, destined to be eternal renters living in Toronto. I'm a teacher, and Jon's an engineer. We've been pre-approved for a mortgage for a little over a year now, which is when we started looking for a house.
It would seem, despite a rather healthy combined income, that we can't afford a starter house in Toronto.
Our story so far is that we've put offers in on 3 houses: the first in August of last year (2008), and the other two were made in the same week in June of this year (2009). Our first offer was rejected, with the seller walking away from all offers and taking the house off the market. We learned from a house we wanted to put an offer in on that we didn't have a chance, as we had a home inspection condition in our offer. Apparently, people are now doing home inspections prior to submitting an offer. When we heard the house went for $50,000 over asking, we realised we were in a much different market than we'd been in before. We both felt totally frustrated with the situation, and vowed we wouldn't be paying for a home inspection before we even knew if we had a chance at a house. It seemed insane to use that we would be using money we'd normally be saving to put towards the house just to try to get in the game.
I swore a lot. I cursed the bloody, selfish fools who first thought of the asinine idea of spending $400 on the effing home inspection before putting in an offer. Didn't they realise the precedent they were setting? Great for them for getting ahead, but didn't they think about everyone else they were screwing over?
The rantings of a mad woman, I realise.
This is what house hunting in Toronto does to you, though. It is not for the faint of heart.
I got off track.
Where was I?
Oh right. Home inspections. So we knew a little bit more now, though, and when we saw a house we thought was cute, we sucked it up and shelled out. We became one of "them": those self-centered asses who would do anything to screw everyone else for the sake of a house. I felt so smug as we sat there, discussing the result of the home inspection with the inspector as another couple looked around the house with their agent.
We were so far ahead.
Right?
Wrong. Our offer was clean, but we couldn't afford the house at $50,000 more than asking, which is what it ended up going for.
The last house we put an offer in on is still too painful to talk about. Maybe we'll write about that one next time.
This process has been frustrating, more than a little heartbreaking, and just plain hard. It's hard to feel such lack of control over such a major purchase. I guess going into this, neither of us thought finding our first house was going to go like this. Maybe we were naïve in thinking we'd look at a couple of houses, feel that "this is the one" feeling, and be done with it.
We argue more than we've ever argued. There's tension sometimes that's never existed before. The stress of finding our house has certainly been taking its toll.
So we're writing this blog to try to make sense of the process, of maybe trying to gain some perspective and insight into this ridiculous roller coaster we're on. Maybe it's an attempt to try to feel somewhat in control.
Is our plight any different from any other first-time home buyers in Toronto? Probably not. Maybe this blog can help make others feel like there is still community, even in such a ridiculously competitive housing market like the one we're currently experiencing.
We know what it's like. Maybe you do, too.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)