Last week, we found a house with a big stone fireplace and a good number of bedrooms that is very close to the water.  The price was on the high end of our price range, but given that it had just about everything we wanted in a house, we went home and ran the numbers.  Within hours we put in an offer of 95% of the asking price.  The offer was valid until 6 PM the following night.

At 6 PM the following night, the broker called back and told us that the offer had been accepted by the buyer.  The only issue was that the realtor said that they did not have a pre-approval letter from us, and the buyer would not sign the offer until we were pre-approved for a loan.

I knew that the broker had a pre-approval on record for us that was merely a month old.  Even though the letter from the mortgage company clearly said “pre-approval” on line 1, the broker claimed that the letter that we had was considered a “pre-qualification” letter and not a “pre-approval” because our incomes and employment had not been verified.

As I couldn’t comprehend the gibberish that they were spewing, and three mortgage companies could only send me a what the broker would consider pre-qualification letter, I was getting not only irritated, but confused.  To the mortgage companies, ther was no such thing as a pre-qualification, and the broker’s notion of a pre-approval didn’t actually exist in the mortgage process.  So, even though the broker had no idea that processing a simple pre-approval had nothing to do with income verification, I went the extra mile and asked the mortgage company to go the extra step and verify our incomes, anyway.  They did.

So, after a half a day of running around and collecting documents, we returned what is commonly known as a “commitment letter” to the real estate broker because they hadn’t any idea about how the mortgage process works.  Within hours, the broker began calling the mortgage company asking them to write an amount into the “commitment letter” that covered the entire cost of the house rather than the amount that we asked the mortgage company to lend us.  The offer was already expired by over 2 days, but without this information, the seller would still not sign the already invalid offer. 

Given that we had been jumping through hoops and going way beyond what is required of a buyer, I put my foot down.  I called the broker and told her to stop calling the mortgage company (that is my business) and to work things out before we plunged deeper into the lunacy.  Half-way in to the call, the broker started a sentence with, “Well, when the seller bought his house he had to provide bla bla bla…”  Whoa, hold on there, Sparky. If the real estate broker was basing her visions of the way the house buying process works upon the experiences of the seller, there was a major problem with the real estate broker. Once I had her attention and was free from interruptions, I then spent the next 15 minutes explaining the process behind buying a house, including the difference between a pre-approval and a commitment letter.  Finally, the broker realized that she was in error, and apologized saying that the the seller was a very nervous man and that he had given her a “brain cramp.”

By the end of the day, the seller had signed the offer with no further hoops for us to jump through, allowing us to schedule the home inspection for this past Saturday.  While I was busy calling the lawyer to get the paperwork moving, we got a message that the seller had agreed to a lower than asking selling price and did not want a “laundry list” of items to fix after the home inspection.  As I was already informed of the seller’s nervous personality, and my personality was saying, “tough shit,” I wrote it off.

We attended the home inspection early on Saturday morning, not expecting to really find anything wrong.  I thought that even if I found some minor issues, I am handy enough to fix them.  If there were major issues, I could always hire someone to fix them correctly.  “Correctly” is a very important point for me.  I might throw my clothes on the floor, but if there is work to be done, I will either do it right myself, or hire someone to do it right if I can’t.  I won’t do a sloppy job, and I won’t let others. It is stupid and a little crazy, but I’m oddly offended by sloppy work on a house, and I don’t know why. When others have done sloppy work on a house, it actually makes me angry.

After the 2.5 hour inspection, I was pretty much entirely pissed off.  Plaster was coming off the walls, the 200 amp electrical service was actually 100 amps, the fist sized holes looked as if they let a blind guy with no arms do all the plaster patching.  His blind buddy did the painting.  Needless to say, I came up with the exact laundry list that the seller was worried about. 

The first floor had an electrical box actually screwed to the floor.  I’ve seen them sunken to the floor (which I don’t like), but never have I seen a six inch by six inch electrical box screwed to the dining room floor.  The entire second floor was a gut job. The price they were asking for the work they had cruelly inflicted on the house, the rehab wasn’t worth it to me.  If they had done no work, I would’ve been happier, as I would save the extra step of undoing their work before doing my own. 

I didn’t want to disappoint the GF because I know how much she liked the house, but I really don’t want to do any major work to a house if it falls on the high end of what I can afford.  And this house needed a lot of work.  So, for a day or so, I stewed.  I had a really tough time with it.  There was lots of staring out the window and trying to find a way to make both of us happy, but finally arrived at the opinion that the offer should be retracted.  The GF, as sweet as she is, put me at ease quite nicely.  She said, “We’re in this together.  We both have to live with this decision.  If you have serious reservations about this house, then we can’t go forward.”

And I think that was the nicest thing that she could’ve done.

When we retracted, the broker was very understanding, and the hassle was much less than I expected (I was prepping for war, and the GF was making tea.  Tea was in order.).  The broker wanted me to give a copy of the inspection to the seller, and I said I’d look for it, but given that a home inspection costs $400 and the sellers were a fat pain in the ass, I think I’m going to have a lot of trouble finding my copies.

You win some, you lose some.

Posted in #1GF!