Author: ti

The house that got away?

Life is moving pretty fast around here: Just over a week ago I was still in law school and didn’t know where I was going to live starting this June or where I was going to sit for the bar. Then, one week ago today L. got a job in Billings. A couple of days later I finished law school, and just a couple off days later we made an offer on a house!

Talk about stress. The seller was asking $105k, we offered $95k, and immediately wished we’d offered $90k as a starting point. The seller countered at $100k (not really surprising), but since we’d already offered basically what we wanted to pay, we had no room to move. After endless debate and mulling, during which we considered whether to counter the counter at $97.5k, we finally decided to stay w/our original offer. Of course, immediately after making that decision we wished we’d just gone for the $97.5 b/c then the house would be hours (we assume) and all of the stress and uncertainty would be over and we’d have ourselves a nice little home w/in an easy walk to work for both of us (if I get a job, that is). Second-guessing is great!

Now, as we wait for the seller to respond to our unchanged original offer, it seems certain he’s going to tell us to take a hike and we’ll be back to square one. Not cool.

One reason this deal has not gone so well is that we ended up working w/a “statutory broker” instead of a buyer’s real estate agent. We didn’t realize that until we were making the offer, at which point we were too interested to back out and find another agent. But once we learned that our agent has so little obligation to us and is not bound to keep any confidence w/us w/regard to finances, etc., it became pretty difficult to trust her advice as to pricing and what might be a fair offer. Was she telling the seller everything we said about how much we could afford or how high we might be willing to go? Maybe not, but that would probably be in her best interest. Does anyone know how a statutory broker gets paid? Would the broker’s fee depend on the sales price of the home? [tags]montana, homebuying, real estate, realtors[/tags]