The House Hunt Continues

A couple of weeks ago we made an offer on a house. It was a reasonable offer, but contingent on the house passing the financing-required inspection or else any remediations coming out of the seller's end. The seller seemed to be worried about that, and was thinking it over when she got a cash offer. Reasonable. Sorry we didn't get that house, but that's how it goes.

This last few days were a little different.

We found a house we really liked. We offered the list price minus a fairly small amount in "concessions" -- closing costs and/or one possible inspection-required repair totaling no more, possibly less, than the "concessions" maximum -- that very day.

We got a counter-offer reducing the potential concessions maximum, but before we could respond to that offer, we got a call from our realtor: The sellers "got to talking" and decided to wait another year to sell the house.

I understand their reasons. The house is on a large lot that used to be larger. The part that's no longer included is separated by a fence with a gate and has another house on it, and kids' toys in the yard. I speculated when I saw that that they'd given one of their kids the smaller lot and that the toys belonged to grandkids. Turns out I was right, and at the last minute they decided they weren't ready to "move to town" and be away from the grandkids just yet.

Understanding their reasons isn't the same thing as not being pissed off.

The time to decide you don't want to move away from your grandkids and aren't going to sell your house is before you put it on the market, not after a bunch of people, including prospective buyers and realtors, have spent a bunch of their time and money looking at / showing it and someone has made a reasonable offer (in this case, at least two offers -- they had a prior one that they accepted but that fell through on some kind of financing thing).

Both of the houses we made offers on fit our pretty non-negotiable criteria:

1. Reasonable commute time to Gainesville, as Tamara is still years from retirement.
2. Reasonable roads for that commute (a few of the houses we've looked at are on very bad rutted sand roads; that doesn't bother me, but it does bother her).
3. A house/location/lot where we think we can happily live out the rest of our lives (we've looked at a couple that seemed like sound "investments" located in areas that are likely future high-dollar development spots such that we could expect to sell at a significant profit and move on, but that's only a value if it's a happy and highly optional coincidence).

Our realtor is a trooper, and he knows we're serious seeing as how we've already made two offers instead of just continually window-shopping (we were called him to make an offer on a third place a few weeks ago, but between the time we looked at it and the time we arrived home and made the call, it went "sale pending" on us).

Anyway, we've got more houses to look at later this week, and I've got good feelz on at least two of them just from looking at the listings. These houses we made offers on were in the Hawthorne area, but now we're back to the west and north -- Bronson, High Springs, Alachua, etc. As well as Gainesville itself, but that's low on my preference list as their insanely mis-managed utility has about double the electricity prices of the rural electric cooperatives around it.