I never thought that buying a house would be simple or straightforward, but each passing second feels like I'm standing in front of a firing squad, wondering if this shot will finally be the one that makes contact. Will it be the bank or the seller's that deal the final blow? Who knows, but at this point, I'm sick of being blindfolded and metaphorically shot at.
We applied for pre-approval for a home loan on June 10th, almost three weeks ago. They told us seven to ten business days. So, after waiting and hoping for seven business days, a loan processor person got in touch with us. She told us that we would have an answer by that Friday, the two week mark.
Friday came and went and no news. By Saturday morning, we started to worry so we called our loan officer. He told us flat out that we were 99% approved and they just needed the official paperwork and it was in the mail. If no one got in touch with us by Monday at 3PM, call him.
Like clockwork, 3PM on Monday came and went and no word. We tried to call the loan officer and he wouldn't pick up. We tried to get a hold of him for two days and absolutely nothing. Then, come Wednesday, we got an email from the loan processor, one week after she first got a hold of us and told us two days. She sent us a long list of paperwork she needed and, oh yeah, she needed it by tomorrow. Oh, and to make things more fun, it was ALL stuff we'd given our loan officer. After frantically finding tax papers that Dan had apparently hidden before leaving for his business trip (yep, handling all this by myself) and sneaking into the print room at work to scan them, writing an explanation letter as to why we did not in fact live at that address because if you used your eyes you'd see that the same address was listed three lines down without the typo, and five other things, it's officially been declared ridiculous. If we weren't so far into the process with both our time and money, we'd walk away from this debacle, but it's too late now. If we don't get approved, I can't imagine attempting this whole damn thing again.
Add to the perfect storm: putting an offer in on a house. There's been this one house we've had our eye on and since the loan approval was supposed to come through last Friday, we got more serious about putting in an offer. And when Dan's business trip popped up and we heard from our realtor that two other people were interested, we decided we needed to put in an offer ASAP. Our realtor reassured us that, even though the pre-approval wasn't technically finished, it wouldn't really be necessary until a prcie was settled.
Even though it's an amazing house, the owner's are very attached to it and have overpriced it by about $70,000. We made an offer $15,000 below what it's worth to open lines of communication and to see how serious they were about selling. Our realtor told us that unless the counter-offer was at least $40,000 lower, the seller wasn't really serious about our offer.
We got the counter-offer today.
Only $17,000 lower.
We weren't prepared for that. I don't think it's fully sunk in. We might not get this house. We might not buy this house. I knew we'd only be able to make an offer on a house we were in love with, but this just seems cruel now.
We plan on making a counter-offer, but at this point, it wouldn't be realistic to expect them to come down much more.
So I stand here now, blind, wondering what will be thrown at me next and if the hit will be fatal this time.
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