Buying a house is a pain in the ass. People will warn you about it when you start looking, but they are kind. They don't want to scare you off the prospect, because having a house is cool. As an added bonus they can come over and enjoy hanging out while you get to clean up the mess later, or maybe that's just why I want you to have a house.
Once you decide it's time to buy a house you might think that finding a house that you like/love, in your price range, in a neighborhood that doesn't scare you because of the crack dens or Stepford-ness of it, is the hard part. You look through listings online. You enlist friends to look through listings online. You have a realtor looking through listings and sending you messages every day or two. You trek all across town multiple times a week sometimes marking off large swaths of the map that you never want to visit again, other times wistfully gazing at the property whose value is a little too high for your current needs. Yeah, that's not the hard part.
The hardest part of buying a house is waiting for other people to do the shit they need to do. See, once you find that house that you want you get to make an offer. You sign some papers promising to pay some amount of money and then you send it away to the seller. If you're unlucky you aren't the only one who liked what they saw. We had to wait for the seller to decide that they wanted to let everyone submit a second round of offers so that we could wait some more before they finally accepted our offer on the house. Mind you they accepted our offer on Feb 26th, and we have been waiting since then for them to sign the contract and send it back. We have been waiting about 20 days for them to sign a piece of paper that they had already agreed to verbally and mail the damn thing back. Really? Seriously? I mean, I'm a procrastinator, but even I'm not that bad. This unsigned contract has meant that the mortgage broker could not submit the loan app, the realtor could not schedule the house inspection, and meanwhile we have been marching on, steadily getting closer and closer to the date of April 6th that was printed on that unsigned contract as our closing date. We have been waiting for this contract to come back for longer than we have left to go until that close date. That's just nuts. Of course, I still don't know that anyone has a copy of this so-called executed contract yet. I was told that the seller's agent has it and that she is sending it to our realtor and our mortgage broker, but I don't know if she's done it yet. Still, if it's signed I'm a happy camper. If I have to, I will find her and drive to her house to pick it up personally tomorrow just to get this show on the road.
Now we're waiting to find out when we'll inspect the house (hopefully this week) and then we get to wait and make sure the loan goes through. We are pre-approved for the loan, but I'll be nervous until it's all said and done. All this waiting is what is really getting to me. You sit and you wait and there is nothing that you can do that will make things go any faster or easier, like being on hold listening to some terrible muzak playing the same two songs over and over, except that in the end hopefully you get a house.
2 comments:
Oh, man what a PITA! I guess that's the problem with dealing with banks, they don't give a shit about you, although you think they'd be in a hurry to get that house off their books.
I feel your pain. Every step seems huge and monumental and seems like it will never happen, and then there's MORE after that! But it does end. Hold tight!
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