I mentioned a while ago that we would be buying a house when our lease ended in April. Well that's still the plan, and we actually started our search at the end of January. We knew it would take a while to find a realtor, nail down the financing, and we wanted to really have time to explore the market, know what we could get at our price point, and figure out what neighborhoods we wanted to be in.
So, we've been officially house hunting for about a month now. And boy, are things different than house hunting in upstate New York! When we bought Wendhurst Castle, we had looked at lots of houses, and finally knew that the Castle was the one. We put in an offer, they countered, we accepted and - that was it. It was ours!
Here in Denver, things are an entirely different matter. There is a serious shortage of housing for the amount of people that have moved to Denver in the last few years. When we were apartment hunting, someone told us they were building 15,000 apartments over the next year. Denver is growing! Which means a few things - houses sell really, really fast, and for significantly more than list price. Our realtors counseled us that if we found a house we liked, to go ahead and put in an offer, immediately. Denver's purchase contracts are set up to protect the buyer so you can basically withdraw your offer for any reason. So the idea is that if you see a house you think you might like, go ahead and put in an offer, and hope that it is accepted.
To date, we've put in offers on *7* different houses! We submitted one our first weekend house shopping, and lost on that one. We submitted an offer for a lovely house with a lofted hallway and a beautiful yard, and lost. We submitted an offer on a gorgeous house that reminded me of my grandparents' house, with an escalation clause that offered up to $30,000 over asking price, and lost. That house received 24 offers in a single day, and sadly ours was not the winning bid. We were pretty sad about that one.
We have won one of our offers! Last weekend Denver got an "epic" snowstorm. It wasn't much of a storm by NY standards, but just about everything was shut down, church was canceled and few houses were listed. We submitted an offer sight unseen on a property that looked really promising, but ultimately withdrew the offer once we visited the property. It just wasn't the right fit for us.
We're also waiting to hear back on a bank owned property that is taking their sweet time responding to our offer. It's little fixer upper that would be a fun project to take on. But, it's been almost two weeks and we have yet to hear from the bank, so our hopes are not high for that property.
So we have about two weeks left to find the "perfect" house. After that, with closing dates and such, we'll be up against our end of lease deadline so we will have to find a house, any house, that works. We decided to buy here in Denver since rental prices are already very inflated, and would have gone up even more had we stayed here or tried to find a bigger rental. Our kids need a yard, we would like another 1-2 bedrooms for kiddos and guests, and it just makes a lot more financial sense to own rather than rent in this market. We would appreciate your prayers over the next few weeks as we really work to find a house that will work for us!
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