House #18: First Contract

We put The Haggle House under contract to sell today, after about a month on the market…

This one was tough to get under contract simply because we didn’t get a whole lot of traffic through the property. The house is about 100 yards over the border into a county that is further from the city, and therefore a bit less desirable. I have a feeling a lot of buyers overlooked this house because they had the more desirable county listed in their search, and this house didn’t show up.

Anyway, once we realized this and started marketing it more heavily (sending emails, making phone calls, referring buyers who have been looking at our other properties, etc), we started to get some more traffic, and was able to get a pretty quick offer and contract.

The offer was pretty good, and our counter-offer wasn’t much more than the buyer’s original offer — just $1000 more in sale price, a shorter due diligence period and using our own closing attorney. We also requested that the buyer use our mortgage broker (and offered to pay her appraisal costs if she did), but she decided to stay with her current lender for now. We’re hoping she still changes her mind.

The buyer has a week of due diligence and two weeks to get her financing in order…we’re scheduled to close at the end of July. I’ll post more when we get through the inspections and appraisals…