Sold!

I’m not normally superstitious but I wanted to wait until the house was sold before posting again. I was afraid I’d jinx it. Our house was on the market for two weeks averaging three showings per day, but despite the hot market, none of the showings were turning into offers. Our house is nice, but quite small. For people used to touring houses with ensuite bathrooms, walk-in closets, and gourmet kitchens, it just doesn’t compare. We needed the right buyer, someone who prioritized being immersed in nature over the square footage of the house. Large, treed lots like ours are few and far between within the city limits.

Ray was getting concerned that no one was going to want our house, and it was hard for him not to take it personally. He’s put so much of his blood, sweat and tears into this place over the last 22 years. There’s little that he hasn’t transformed, from the exterior of the house…

…to the interior of the house…

…to the landscaping (no ‘before’ pic for this one).

Finally, we awoke Wednesday morning to the news that we had an offer. Not a great offer, but an offer. We went back mid-afternoon with our counter-offer and gave them until 9 pm to respond. We had showings scheduled for that evening at 6:00 and 7:00, so I went out for a beer with friends while Ray hid out in a neighbour’s backyard.

By a fluke of timing, a couple – who Ray had previously given a tour of the house – pulled up just as Ray was sneaking home between showings to grab some food. They said they wanted to buy the house. Ray explained that the house was already under offer and we were waiting to hear back. Around that time, I got a call from the broker saying our counter-offer had been countered, and he recommended we accept it, given how many showings we’d had with no offers. I called Ray and he brought me up to date on the new development, so I drove home while he let the broker know about the second offer. The new offer was a fair bit higher than the first one and they seemed perfect for our place.

At 8:30, our broker called to say the second offer was conditional on financing and the first buyer had  upped the offer and removed all conditions. Apparently, unconditional offers are the holy grail so the lower offer trumped the higher, but conditional, offer.

Just 25 minutes before our deadline to accept the offer, the plot thickened. The client from the 6:00 showing made an offer. Over the next hour, our broker was back and forth with the three agents and then called to present us with the options. This is when it got tricky because we’d met the first two buyers and made a personal connection with them, but we knew nothing about the third buyer. It’s hard to remove emotions from the process of buying or selling a home, and having seen how much the first two buyers loved our property made the decision more difficult than it should have been. In the end, we accepted the offer with the least financial risk to us, which also happened to be the highest offer (the third buyer who we’ve not yet met).

In any case, the house sold for over asking, which we really didn’t see coming when we woke up that morning. Now we can stop worrying about keeping our home in show-ready condition and leave the dishes in the sink whenever we feel like it.

The closing date for our place is the end of October, so now we can turn our attention to finding somewhere to live and see what it feels like to be on the other side of the table.