Another piece of the puzzle

While I was in DC last week for work we had quite a busy week at home with showings.  Poor CP had to leave with the dogs for hours on end because we had so much interest!  I’m definitely not complaining….let’s just say it is a good thing that he hasn’t been too busy at work recently!

So in the first two days we had seven different showings.  On the third day a couple from Alabama came for the third time and called our realtor to make an offer….an offer $30,000 BELOW our asking price.  HA HA HA HA.  It was very insulting.  I get that they probably had a palatial place down in Alabama, but that is not the housing market here.  Not only are we getting a lot of traffic in the door for showings, but the house has been on the market for TWO DAYS and we haven’t even had the open house yet.  Not to mention we just spent money on a painter to repaint the trim in the house and reglaze the front windows.  Way to piss off the sellers- especially because we competitively priced our house only a few thousand more than when we bought the place because we wanted it to sell quickly.  Maybe they thought that we were in financial trouble and that they could get a steal of a house??? 

CP was tempted to not even start to negotiate with these people, but we ended up dropping our price by $1000 because they came in with a strong offer otherwise (not having to sell a house, putting a bunch of money down, etc).  They came back with an offer only $8000 more than their first offer, we dropped the price by $4000.  They upped their price by $5000, then we gave our realtor a final offer of $10,000 off our initial asking price on Sunday.  We were prepared to lose a little money on the house just to get it sold quickly because CP’s relocation package would help with the loss.

The open house went well on Sunday, but the realtor didn’t have anyone telling her that they were going to contact their agent about the house.  Meanwhile, we had a showing Monday morning and then a second showing again that afternoon.  The Alabama buyers came back and said that they would take our final offer of the $10,000 off our asking price Monday afternoon.  BUT then the realtor got a call that the people that came in for two showings on Monday said that they were writing an offer.  They knew that they were up against a different offer so that they had to make it strong.  BIDDING WAR!  Love it.

So these new people came in with a much better offer (over our asking price!) and also don’t have to sell a house themselves.  SCORE.  Our realtor went back to the Alabama couple to see if they wanted to better their offer, and then inexplicably lowered their offer to $20,000 below our initial asking price.  I’m truly hoping that this negotiation is not the realtor’s strategy because it is awful!  First, piss off the sellers with an insulting offer three days after a house goes on the market and then lower the bid once you find out there is another offer in play?  WTF? 

Obviously we signed the offer from the second set of buyers who came in above asking price.  Because they came in with a serious offer, we are going to be more willing to work with them on any inspection items that come up….whereas we would have been hard-a**es with the Alabama couple- who also seemed as if they would be nit-picking on the inspections items too.

Another piece of the puzzle has fallen into place- after only 8 days on the market!  I just hope we get a competent appraiser!!