Good morning!
The main character of this blog is the land. The Ranch. The Homestead. I don’t know what to call it, but if we’re lucky, we’ll have the chance to call it home soon.
We’ve been searching for a house for over three years now. It’s rather difficult to find what we want because we are a traditional family. The nuclear family is much more common in the US; but we’ll be a married couple and the woman’s mother. So we’re looking for two houses on one very big lot, or one divideable house in a massive stretch of space.
And we may have found it. We put an offer down four months ago. It was very exciting — the sellers had to go with a short sale, because a foreclosure looks so much worse on credit reports — and they liked our offer. They liked it so much it was the only one they passed on to the lender, the bank.
Short sales work, in short (sorry) like this (as I understand it): house gets evaluated and goes up for sale with a minimum amount being that valuation. If there is no offer, the foreclosure happens 6 months after it goes on the market. If there is an accepted offer, that time period is extended another 6 months. The foreclosure is averted when the sale closes.
The house went on the market in June of 2009. We didn’t see it on our searches because it was SO MUCH land that we didn’t even consider that much in our pricerange. An offer was put down by another party on a Tuesday in January; it was rejected, but it did reset the 6-month period. That same Tuesday I reset our search, and up it popped! We heard about it on Wednesday’s batch email, went to see it on Thursday, and sent them an offer on Friday.
And it went into foreclosure the following Monday. We know a lot of very bad words and found creative combinations for them all. The air around our current residences turned BLUE.
So the seller’s agent visited the bank personally, and threatened legal action, and put a hold on the foreclosure auction. It’s still in ‘hold’ status, so at least it’s not out of our hands yet. I personally think that the bank holds so many short sales that it wants to keep the hits to its bottom line steady and is parceling out the short sales per quarter. In this month, April, the government set up the HAFA program so that might have added to the ‘wait to sell’ attitude we’re being tortured with.
Last week a representative from the bank told us that they thought we were given ‘a raw deal’ and that they would take our case ‘before the board’ sometime this week, to see what could be done. So perhaps, sometime this week, we will hear some positive news.
In the meantime, the Fun Fact for this post is: the same spikes which make artichokes so touchy to eat make the plants marvelously deer-resistant.
