This probably will not be interesting to anyone, but before I forget, I wanted to jott down what happened and how I felt when we crossed the milestone: our first offer on a home.

On Saturday, March 27, Hubby and I compiled the addresses of the open houses we wanted to see and mapped out the best route.  Microsoft Street and Maps is great because after I type in all the addresses, I just select the “Optimize Stops” button and it maps out the best route for the shortest distance.  Great feature!

We were pleasantly surprised by one of the homes that had a lot of potential.  (After four months of on-and-off searching, we had seen our fair share of major duds.)  It had remodeled bathrooms and kitchen, new paint, lots of closet space, and a big lot at 7,725sf.  The home itself was on the smaller side of 1,244 sf with 3 beds and 2 baths.  Another great thing was that it was a quiet cul-de-sac of about seven homes.  The  schools were decent, which was a major requirement for us.  Also, in the future, if we chose to remodel, we could possibly knock out the wall that divides the living room and kitchen to create a very open atmosphere.

On Sunday, March 28, we headed over to one of the open houses that we missed on Saturday.  We liked this home as well. We took some photos, so we would remember the features when we got home.  Then, we decided to see the home we liked on Saturday (mentioned above) again and to take some pictures.

When we got home, we compared the data, the photos, our impressions, and decided that it was best not to bid on the second home.  Unfortunately, the elementary school was not as strong as we were looking for.  The first home though was deserving of an offer, but we would have to think about it some more first.

On Tuesday, we emailed the listing agent to let him know that we were interested in making an offer.  He basically said that he wanted all offers by 5pm the next day.  That put us in scramble mode.  I quickly filled out the membership application and made an appointment with the local real estate association for Wednesday morning.  (I had put off joining an association because I wanted to join one close to where we would be living.  But, with the rush, I just picked one).   One item down…two more to go.

Next on the to-do list was to get pre-approved for the loan.  We put off doing this because we did not want to have our credit constantly checked, which negatively affects one’s credit score.  Most pre-approval letters are only good for about 30-90 days, and we wanted to get it done when we were seriously considering homes.  We drove around to a few banks, but none of the loan officers were in at the time.  Luckily, I remembered a lady that we had met a couple months before at another open house.  She was able to process our documents and get us a pre-approval letter in about two hours.  Two items down…one more to go.

The last thing to do was to actually write the offer.  I started filling in the basic information, name, address of property, etc.  The difficult part was figuring out how much we wanted to offer.  Since it was our first offer, we did not want to over offer, but we did not want to lowball in case we would not even be considered.  We came up with an offer price about 2% less than asking and submitted everything to the listing agent.

A couple hours after the offer was submitted, the listing agent called to let us know that they had received 10 offers – some were all cash, some had lower contingency periods, and that the high bid was about 6% over asking.  He said that the owner was going to just pick one and not counter offer.  I said thank you for letting me know but that we would not be changing our offer.  After hanging up, Hubby kept having a desire to offer more, but in the end we did not.

It was a crazy scramble getting everything in order to submit the offer, but we did it.  It sucked getting outbid.  It was exciting to make an offer on a home.  It was scary to make an offer on a home.  It sucked getting outbid.  It was a learning experience.  It was stressful trying to get everything done in such a short amount of time.  It sucked getting outbid.  Overall, we were grateful for the opportunity, but this one was not ours.  Maybe the next one?