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I shared a quick bit of news yesterday from David Cleveland, the house-hunter whose search for a home to purchase we’ve been featuring for the last several weeks.
Here’s the full scoop:
What ended up happening on the house that was small was that our offer was accepted! We were extremely excited and scheduled a home inspection for that Friday when Jill and I would actually see the house together for the first time. Overall the inspection indicated that the house was in relatively good shape for a foreclosure and the inspector reiterated that this house was great from his experience with the notable exceptions that the air conditioning did not work as well as it should have, and that there was a leak from the hot water heater into the house which happened to pretty much soak the wall in the garage and the neighboring bedroom.
We would have to remove the dry wall on both sides, re-mediate any mold (this was a big issue for Jill as she is very allergic to mold spores) and repair the leaking joint which was a copper to pvc fitting.
We were like ‘OK, this is a big deal, but not that big’. What bugged Jill more though was the traffic noise from I-15 which was a block or two away and below us. She said it felt like she was in traffic instead of in her home.
We paid the inspector his $450 and went to dinner wondering what we were getting ourselves into. As soon as we sat down we got a call from our agent indicating that one of the homes that we had previously made an offer, and that we had subsequently sent a ‘letter of intent’ to had fallen out of escrow, and ‘were we still interested?’
We told our agent we would talk about it and get back to her within the hour. It took us all of 5 minutes before we called her back excited about this other house. The home is about 10 years older and has about the same square feet as the first one, but has my prized 4th bedroom, a pool, and is in a much quieter area of Rancho Bernardo away from the freeway. We put in the verbal offer which was formalized on the following Monday.
The home inspection of the new house went smoothly, and though there was an issue with the furnace and A/C which could not be tested, we have requested the bank to fix it and we believe they will. In addition, the bank paid for some termite remediation and a new pool filter. They may be more willing to do some of these things since they are not a Southern California based bank, but whatever the case, we are grateful.
Also on the Friday we had the inspection on the first house, we met with our mortgage broker about our options, which weren’t many given the current credit crisis. Rates then were still pretty high, and with the end of the year and holidays approaching it has been unclear as to what direction, if any, 30 year mortgage rates would be going. We passed on locking in a rate last Friday knowing that the Federal Reserve would be meeting this week, and though the Fed Funds rate generally doesn’t have an impact on mortgage rates (in October, 30 year mortgage rates actually went up when the Feds Fund rate declined) we felt that there might be an opportunity for rates to drop.
This morning (December 17th) they dropped and we locked in at 5.25%. This gets our projected payments down to where we wanted to be. Now all we are waiting for is all the underwriting, paperwork, and final approvals to be completed. At this point it does not look like we will close by the end of the year, but we should be able to take possession, we hope, sometime during the first week of January.
Jill is already planning on what painting she might want to do before the moving company arrives, and she knows that January is the busiest time of the year for me work wise so that she won’t be getting much in the way of input from me either in choosing colors or doing the actual work. We know we need to add some safety fencing or barrier to the pool for our twin girls, and they are having a great time talking about their ‘new’ house. As for me, I’m still somewhat in shock that there might be light at the end of the tunnel. I don’t want to get too excited until the paperwork is signed though, just in case.
Cleveland said he won’t be spending Christmas on the boat; he and Jill and their twins are going to Arizona with his parents for the holidays. We’ll keep you posted as he shares more near the close of escrow.
As always, if you have ideas, thoughts or story tips on these issues or others related to surviving in San Diego, please pass them along to kelly.bennett@voiceofsandiego.org.