Our town home development is on its final phase of building. But they don't start selling for another month or so. So, we thought that maybe we had our feelings because it would take awhile to sell and Ben is applying for a lot of jobs that are out of state. The good news was that the new ones are selling for higher than we bought ours for. The past few years, we would have lost money if we had sold. Yay for better market!
We decided to pay a real estate broker to list our house on MLS for a flat fee but sell the home by owner. It took the listing to be put up about 24 hours. THAT night, a girl came to look at the house with no warning. She tried to call but could not reach the agent. Let me say it was THE worst time for her to come. Dinner everywhere, not even straightened and I had just showered with my hair wet. But I let her in and she looked at the house for about 30 seconds (no joke) and said, "Oh its the same as the one down the street." A similar but newer town home was for sale about 200 yards down from us. But it was priced really high for several reasons. It was a "make me move" price. Anyway, after her self guided very short tour, she asked our plans. Ben was not home and I was not a fan of doing this myself with three kids at dinner time. I told her I would call her later. We decided to meet the following morning on Saturday.
She had no agent and we had no representation. So, it was a little bit of a learning process. But really all that mattered at first was negotiating the price and what would be included. After that morning, I would have said no to that buyer if I hadn't had a feeling that this was going to go through completely. She had some preconceived ideas about home pricing and Ben was really good about helping her understand why we priced what we did. She also told us that she had bought a new condo in Provo already, but the funding didn't go through on the builders side, and so she needed to find a place in the next couple of weeks. She had furniture on hold that was waiting to be shipped. What?! We said that the earliest we could be out was three weeks. Not to mention, paper work and the appraisal would take time. After a couple of days of hammering out the price and details (longest days of my life) we came to an agreement. I had to constantly pray and ask if this was right. I would randomly get scared of leaving and the whole process happening so quickly. I went over the documents with her since I had looked into it (thank goodness) before she filled them out on her own. We had our listing agent and a friend look over the paperwork before we took it to the title company and it took some tweaking, but it wasn't heavily detailed, so it wasn't too bad.
We had an appraisal on rush order and it went well. Then it was packing and cleaning time. It was shocking to our neighbors since we never even had a sign out front. It was still being shipped to us. Haha.
It was super crazy and rushed. We are incredibly grateful to Grandma and Grandpa Allsop for letting us stay in their basement. Moving was a huge deal and we will do it again in the next while.
When we left we felt so good and no regrets. Even a little bit of a freeing feeling. So sad to leave our area, but we made great friends and memories that we will still have.
Ben finally has time to focus on the job hunt.
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