Early this summer we had an incident in our apartment building that tipped me over the edge as far as moving goes. I had to get us out of this apartment and into someplace else. I initially started looking at apartments believing that it would cost us less to get into an apartment than a house. I couldn’t find an apartment the size we needed in a decent location for anything near what we could afford.
At that point my husband started looking at mortgage rates and estimated payments for house prices in our town. He pointed out that with a Veteran’s loan we wouldn’t need much money up front if we could afford the monthly costs. We started seriously looking at houses what we thought was our price range. I had developed a minimum and maximum cost based on what I thought we could afford and what I was willing to deal with.
After looking at a few “no way, no how” houses, we found a gorgeous split level ranch in wonderful shape. It was in a nice neighborhood and was snapped up the next day by a woman looking for a house for her retirement. We learned from that house that we needed to be able to immediately put in an offer, we needed our own real estate agent, and I was more flexible with house styles than I thought.
My husband then got the ball rolling with the Veterans Administration and finding a real estate agent. I would like to mention at this point that I have anxiety issues that make it difficult for me to reasonably deal with a paperwork and negotiations around buying a house. After we got our own real estate agent, http://www.tompkinscortlandrealestate.com/ , I started looking at listings online. I would email my husband and the agent the urls and the times I was available. They would arrange everything else. It’s a good thing our agent had a great sense of humor, every viewing had half of our family with us. We looked at about a dozen houses when we found The House.
On June 20th we had looked at two other houses before walking into the backyard of a traditional 1920’s four square style house. I was willing to forgive quite a bit in the house to get the yard; it was huge and looked like a park. The inside of the house was better and better the more we saw. The décor is dated but the house was clean, in great condition, and there had been a ton of updates done to it. Wiring, insulation, windows, stair rails, to name a few. The layout of the house felt like home to me; it was the mirror image of my father’s house.
On June 21st we signed the offer. Our real estate agent has been awesome at pushing this along, coordinating with everyone, and generally advocating for us. We will have the closing in less than two months after we signed the offer. There were three other factors in this happening so quickly; I could immediately lay my hands on almost every piece of documentation requested, everyone accepted scans of documents and signatures, and very little mail was sent through the post office.
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