As the Housing World Turns

Last week we were in the car, driving to meet the realtor Realtor (why is it a proper noun??) to put our offer in on our Desired Home (runner up #1 was upgraded to Desired Home, with the previous DH being disqualified for several reasons, all of which involved large amounts of money). Now, this house had been on the market for about 6 days. Yes, that's days. Not weeks, nor months, but days. And then...my phone rang.

Someone else put an offer on the house. A full price offer. With 20% down. And a conventional, non-FHA mortgage. And guess what?? They accepted that offer. Well, no shit.

So we literally turned the car around and drove home, rather dejected. Of all the disappointing scenarios I had envisioned, being turned down before we even put our offer in was not one of them, considering the tiny amount of time the house had been on the market. Of course, everyone says we'll find a better house, that it wasn't meant to be. And it drives me NUTS. No, that was an amazing house. Incredible. That's why it sold with a full price offer in less than a week. I don't doubt that we will get a house, but a better one than that, at the price it was listed for? Probably not.

A couple of days later we went and looked at another handful, plus we looked at one from the previous week again. This is the previous runner up #2. It's not perfect by any means, but it has great potential and I think we're going to put in an offer this week. It's a short sale, and while I'm a tiny bit optimistic, I'm trying to not get my hopes up. We're going to offer over the listing price in an attempt to get them to pay closing costs. I've read that trying to do that is somewhat of a mixed bag and may or may not actually work. Can't hurt to try though.

House attempt #2 - Can we at least put an offer in this time?