My wife and I have been looking at property on our own for a year or two now, but never with any help. So, last Saturday we made an appointment at a local real estate office. They had an inhouse lender who took some information from us and quickly calculated a reasonable price ceiling. He then got paperwork together to get us approved for a loan. While we were doing that, the agent was looking up property in the area that would match our range. We then drove around to see the properties. We found one in particular that we fell immediately in love with:
When I was a kid, my family used to rent a cabin in Mammoth, CA with almost the same floorplan as this place. The agent told us that the price had gone down 25% on this one over the last few months, because it wasn't selling. But the yard was impeccable and the interior was great. Needless to say, we were excited. When we compared this property to anything else we saw that day, nothing even came close.
So we put in a bid on it. We soon found out that there were nine other individuals vying for the same property, and that the counter offer we received was out of our league. But I was caught up in the moment and didn't know what to do. Keep in mind, we had never even looked at houses, gotten a loan approval, or placed a bid on a property before.
So I did what any confused person should do. I called someone with more experience. My father immediately saw the situation for what it was: a frenzy. The seller had had to drop the price significantly in order to get some attention for the property. Once they had our attention, they could easily play us off each other to drive the price back up. My mother reminded me the most important and easiest to forget fact of buying a house: it is a business transaction. You can't let your desire become your decision maker.
So we cut our losses and got out. It was a little painful, but we learned more in one day of playing the game than all our days of dreaming and planning.
