The spring flowers have long since faded and the lawn looks slightly parched, but the “For Sale” sign in front of our house still looks as perky as the day it was planted early last May.
Is our house still on the market? We can answer that with a definite “maybe.” The status now is that we have an accepted offer on our house but whether the bank approves the sale and whether the buyers will hang in there through the process, remains to be seen. We are thankful that after the 45 days that was written into the initial contract passed, the buyers agreed to another 45 days of negotiating time.
When we told our neighbors that we had an accepted offer on the house, they invited the rest of our neighborhood to a goodbye party for us. People kept asking us when we were moving, a question that we couldn’t answer because it’s totally out of our control. We told our neighbors not to get too sentimental about us leaving because as is typical with short sales, it could be a very long goodbye
Our buyers haven’t been to the house since they made the offer on the house almost two months ago but they are coming tomorrow night to show it to their friend who is in town. I’m hoping that they haven’t been doing what I typically do after I commit to a purchase: review all the options out there to see if I have gotten the best deal possible.
It’s like looking through the Target ad after I’ve just bought shampoo at CVS and seeing that I could have saved $3 on it. Every time I get an email notification from our realtor that a new house has come on the market, I imagine myself in the buyers’ shoes and I hope that they aren’t wishing they had passed up our house and instead made an offer on the new-on-the-market house that has hardwood floors and gourmet kitchen.
Then I have to take a step back from my paranoia and remember that our house has lots of really great qualities. And besides, that other house is priced 10% higher than ours.
In the meantime, to get myself in a more forward thinking mode and out of the funk of uncertainty, I’ve started looking at rentals to get a better understanding of what types of places are available and how much space we will be able to get for our money. Have I seen the perfect place? Not yet but I still have plenty of time.