myJason.com

Jason's Blog

Here are things i’m watching the deal sites for:

52″+ LCD Television

Digital Camera

Wireless webcams

Wireless Router

Just a quick update, we are now sleeping at our new house. Its been 3 wonderful nights of a full nights sleep. The house is so quite and our bed is more comfortable than we remember. The house is still a wreck, but at least our bedroom is setup and the boxes are moved out of the garage.

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Tuesday we watched the stock market closely as Monday the Dow Jones Industrial had just experienced the biggest point loss ever. Some people were calling it Black Monday. Thinking that when the Dow lost 777pts more people would be buying bonds, I held off expecting 30 year conventional fixed rates should move lower than 5.625%. We soon learned that no one was buying bonds. They had been taking their money out of the stock market and putting it under their mattresses. Mortgage rates actually increased about a quarter percent that day. Luckily I had talked to Kerry at Countrywide about locking in at the first notice that rates were going up and so we were able to lock in at 5.625% before it was too late. This is a very good interest rate, about half a percent lower than when we were putting in our first offers on homes in August.

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Image by Casey Serin via Flickr

So remember that house I talked about a week or so ago. The house was a really nice house but had some querks we thought we could live with. The house was 249k and we offered 250k and they countered. Well when after about 24 hours from their counter to us, they called our agent and asked what we were going to do because they had another offer coming in that night. I told Mike to let them know we would need the weekend to think about it because we were putting in an offer on another house which was better and cheaper. Well on Monday the homeowner called Mike and pretty much demanded to know any feedback about why we weren’t jumping at their counter offer. He explained that we were upset about his commission being lowered, them wanting to rent the house for a month at lower than our mortgage payment projection, and the fact they were placing such high value on their theater equipment. The homeowner replied to Mike that “this must be the best you can do for what you know how to do” or something along those lines. And they didn’t have another offer.

At this time the house is still available and not under contract. Furthermore now that they have made a personal attack at our agent, you can be sure he won’t purposely show or promote this house to his buyers. Its no wonder they haven’t sold their house in 7 months.

Just to note, we had to contact the buyer directly because while they do have an agent, we are to deal directly with the buyer. Its one of those things where they seller just pays the agent a one time fee of like $1,000 for listing on the mls and a sign in the yard. The seller handles all negotiations and paperwork.

The bank owned house we have been talking about for the last week, we got a response back yesterday that we were the only offer in the end and instead of taking our increased offer (in the multiple offer addendum) they took the original lower offer of 216 with closing of 5500 back. So basically we are paying 210 for a rambler that is 2675 sq feet built in 1999. Now we just have to get an inspection done and watch the interest rates to see where they go. Too bad we didn’t buy one week ago or we could have got 5.3% Here are the current rates: