Prelude to a Kiss

Tueday, April 21

Met with the realtor for the first time.  Probably going to be the best part of this process.  She was the one who worked with my Mom during the insane market of the 80's.  Not looking forward to the process, but Kathi is fantastic, and very sane about this.

May 1998

Punkin and I escaped to Paris for a week or so.  Had a fabulous time.  Now that we're back, it's time to start hunting in earnest.  I am supposed to be organizing the financing, so I need to get started.  It's an awful lot of paper work.

June 1998

I finally selected a mortgage broker and have started the paperwork rolling.  We chose to go with Cindy Stanford at Princeton Capital.  A big part of that decision was that she is in the same offices as our real estate agent.  We figured that we can use all the help we can get.  We're only planning to put 5% down, which means we need lots of cooperation from our lender.

I've also started looking at listings.  Kathi sends me multi-listings and Kathryn and I drive past them.  So far, lots of duds.  It is really an education for me to understand all of the components of the sale process.  Fortunately Kathi is very patient.

June 23

Saw an interesting place over the weekend.  It was in OK condition (but would still require some work).  They are asking $460, which I think is too high.  We won't put an offer in, but Kathi says to treat it as an education.  Watch to see what it sells for, how fast, how many offers they get, etc.

One comforting part is that I can now guess pretty accurately how much a place will cost before I've seen the actual listing.  (assumes I'm looking at the property).

Saturday, June 27

Wow!!!  We just saw a place we really love.  It is a cute bungalow on Bush Street in Mountain View.  The yard is huge (11,000 sq. ft) and the house is a decent size.  It is offered at $450,000 which is within our range, too!!

Monday, 29 June

We met with Kathi tonight and wrote an offer for Bush Street.  I never thought I'd consider paying $500,000 for my first house.  Yikes!  Kathi wasn't overly optomistic about it, but said it was a fair offer.  We'll have to wait and see.  I was glad that she didn't try to influence what we offered.  She gave some general guidance and left it up to us to decide what we could afford.  Very cool,

Tuesday, 30 June

Hmmmm... so this is what it feels like.  We loved the place.  We thought we made a good impression with the owners.  Still, our offer (at $500K) was so far out of the ballpark that the seller's agents actually laughed (or was it sneered) at us.  Kath and I decided that we'd look long and hard before we buy a Chuck & Tori listing.  I don't like the game they play, where they list for so far under what they know they'll eventually get.

Sunday, July 12

The other house is still on the market and they've lowered the price to $440K.  Ed and Adrian still think we're crazy :-) but we thought about putting an offer in.  Unfortunately someone else jumped in and grabbed it.

Hmmm....