mishakononov.com

So for those of you who haven't been in contact with me and have only gotten bits and pieces of the story, here's basically how things went down:

Last week our real estate agent filled Justine and I in on a house that was coming on the market within our price range. In the mean time, we looked at a house nearby that we liked, but weren't crazy about -- it had a good lot, but the inside had a few issues. Nevertheless, it was interesting enough that we decided to go take a second look at it, and to take my sister Marya along as an outside opinion. When we arranged the visit with our agent, he suggested we go look at the one that was just coming on at the same time.

The short story is that we loved the place -- It was spacious, relatively new, had a good floor plan, and butted up against a park. There was some stuff we would have liked to have seen on the inside, but we really just saw it as an opportunity to improve the place in the future -- things like new kitchen counters, changing some of the flooring, etc.

Now being that the house hadn't even hit the market yet, we were expecting to pay near full price. Additionally, we were trying to get a credit on closing costs from the seller. The problem here is that if we tried to pay more than the asking price when it had just hit the market, and appraiser was going to find something fishy about it. But if we made an offer before it hit the market, there would be no asking price and it would hopefully appraise for what we were actually paying for it. So time was short.

We put in an offer and found out earlier today that they had gotten a second offer on the place as well. Not wanting to get into a bidding war, we kept our offer as it was and just sat back to see what happened. Turned out that the other offer had an "escalation clause" in it, meaning that the other buyer was willing to pay $1500 more than any other offer, up to a cap that was "well above asking price".

Denied. And we're still looking for a house.