Posts Tagged ‘appraisal’

Despite my obvious lack of blogging skills, let me post this Part 4 of our House Buying adventure, since most of it has been written for a month…

Well, we got the house! And even though it went so fast, it felt like forever. We had so many things to print, sign, scan, email, and reprint, resign, re-email. Even down to the last few days the underwriters for our FHA loan were extremely nit-picky. Even though I'd already given them everything about our lives, they wanted a screenshot of our bank account showing where I deposited the money from selling stock shares for down payment, because apparently the receipt of counter deposit from the bank teller was not good enough. Also, apparently if you're married woman, you can't give permission for tax transcripts that were from a year before you were married unless you sign it with your maiden name…that just seems pointless to me and a waste of time printing out another copy and having April sign it with her maiden name.

Anyways, despite the monotony of signing all sorts of documents and getting the correct things to the mortgage originator it seemed we were on the home stretch….then the appraisal came in.  Though we were at an agreed sale price of $204,000, already 11,000 less than what the sellers previously bought it for, the appraisal came in way down at $194,000. This was kind of a shock and we really felt that the appraiser did not do the greatest job with it because he used two concrete slab cookie cutter homes as comps to this house which was a custom build.

Nevertheless, there was nothing we could do about it, the appraiser went back and remeasured the house and what not a second time and held firm at his original value of $194,000. Well this seemed like a good and bad thing. It was nerve wracking for April because of the uncertainty of whether the sellers would want to continue working with us or want to back out and try their luck again. But we knew also that it could end up working in our favor, reducing the cost of the house for us even further into the range we really wanted to pay to begin with. So we asked the sellers to accept it at the appraisal cost of $194,000 but that we would reduce the amount of closing costs that we were asking them to pay by $2,000. 

Well, fortunately for us, they knew they were in a bad market for selling their home, but they did not really have a choice since they were relocating because of a job. They accepted the final offer of $194,000 with $2,500 in closing costs. We were definitely excited to hear this. We closed on the house on Friday, February 25th and spent a week hurriedly packing up our town house and slowly moving loads to the new house each night.

The following weekend we had movers grab all the big furniture and left over boxes. With both set of parents coming up to help out, we knocked it out super quick…and it seemed by the end of the first day that we'd already been here a week! Now we have been here almost 4 weeks and we have been loving it. Look for some pictures and our thoughts about the house so far in an upcoming post!

Related articles

• Buying our First House! – Part I (thisorrthat.com)

• Buying our First House! – Part II (thisorrthat.com)

• Buying our First House! – Part III (thisorrthat.com)