She's crafty - and she's just my type

Well lookie here we may have ourselves a house or at least we have a preliminary deal for a house. Let me set up how all this happened :

Last Friday I was starting to get sick and tired of all the doom and gloom talk we were getting from other real estate agents, lawyers, gardeners, next of kin, priests, the local ice cream shop purveyor, and Crazy Carl the guy who fixes stuff in our new apartment building, but most importantly, our mortgage broker was seriously starting to irk me. Since Kendal is in the "business" I mostly let her handle that end of our housing search, actually I was letting her handle the real estate sales side, the legal, and the mortgage stuff.  What can I say?  I know how to delegate! (Just so you know I was doing the finance part of the deal meaning I was determining the pricing/offers we were putting on houses, if you want to see my spreadsheet it will both scare and excite you, I know it does both to me) So I was getting a lot of my information second hand from the mortgage broker, who I used to have a nasty nickname for, but have since redacted it.  OK, I will tell you - llama vomit, I know it doesn't make sense, but all the verbal diaharrea I was hearing made me think of an annoying spitting llama who gives you a sideways glance then proceeds to spew some frothy material all over you. I, of course, only referred to him as this during my sessions of mumbling to myself, which happen more often than not when I get stressed because stressed for me is a foreign object. It just doesn't happen that often and when it does, I handle it the way a little girl handles having worms thrown at them at the playground.  Which if translated correctly means not well at all! OK, back to the point of the blog.  Kendal calls me to tell me that redacted [llama vomit] the mortgage broker informed her that we should be looking for a house in the 100-200K range, which if you have even glanced at housing in the last few years, hasn't existed since somewhere in the early 80's.  A current house costing 100-200K would be considered a crack house in almost every corner of the US except for the Deep South, which Atlanta, is not a part of, nor has it been since it's population growth accelerated to the point of ludicrous speed (if you know your Spaceballs reference you will get the joke here). Upon hearing this I had pretty much crossed the line of anger/resentment/belief/faith/religious fervor/believing in Santa Claus and had to talk to redacted [llama vomit] the mortgage broker myself.  Well turns out he is a nice guy and trying to do right by us, but was trying to make a point that most people's first house is in the 200K range, we both agreed the reality of the situation is that this is just not feasible with today's housing environment and we aren't looking for a 5 and done, because you may not make a dime with that outlook, because of this our top end price is more.  During our conversation I kept referring to a particular house as my example and he ended taking down the address so that  his FHA appraiser could do some checking for us.  The appraiser came back about 15K more than I was going to offer on this particular house, but he happened to mention another home in the area that had its listing expired.  It looked nice and was right at our price range so we called the agent to see if it was still for sale and if we could go see it. Turns out it was and so we perused the property, it is pretty nice, definitely has potential, needs some work here and there with upgrades, but for the most part is ready to be moved into. We went home and had a few lengthy discussions about what we wanted to do which came down to, offer on the expired house, offer on a house that was pricier, but slightly nicer in the neighborhood, or continue to look.  The problem with continuing to look is there is NO inventory out there and no guarantees that it would change, this scared us, the pricier house was nice and is still an option, but we decided to pursue the expired house.  This is where is gets interesting and somewhat underhanded by Kendal, she went behind the listing agents back, because technically he doesn't represent the owner anymore and tracked down the owner himself.  God, I was impressed!  She got all the goods from him including the tidbit that he hasn't had one offer on the place which helped me justify my pricing, of course everything couldn't be all hugs, kisses, butterflies, and warm fuzzy feelings, the guys is a, duh duh duh, lawyer! Which means at some point he is going to be a complete and utter jackass! So I did my math, looked at comparables, and Kendal called to tell him our number.  He didn't outright accept it, but he said it was an offer he could counter off of, but my pricing is pretty solid and I have enough info to back it up, sans maybe 5K, but this would still be a significant reduction compared to every other house for sale or that has sold in the neighborhood, something like 35K. So I feel pretty confident.  The real story is Kendal, I cannot belive that kind of gumption, I love it and in the immortal words of the Beastie Boys:

She's crafty - she's gets around
She's crafty - she's always down
She's crafty - she's got a gripe
She's crafty - and she's just my type
She's crafty

(take out the obvious sexual references and replace them with business references and this makes more sense)
 
More updates to come!
 
So wishing us good luck and happy hunting!