Imagine here a picture of a “home for sale sign” with the big white and red SOLD placard over top. Escrow closed around noon yesterday, but apparently the “for sale” sign was just taken down, rather than changed to “sold”. I took it as sign that everyone involved in the process was just happy escrow was finally over.

We put our house on the market in April. The first weekend we got several above asking offers. We went with the best one, but alas, it was not meant to be. We granted several extensions to the perspective buyers, but in the end the buyer walked citing the loan contingency. It was now mid June, and many of the aspects that made our home so attractive were no longer working in our favor. There were more homes in our price category, whereas we were the only one before, and the summer peak buying season had passed. The news was reporting that the housing market was slowing, and the new offers were not as nice as those early offers had been.

I am still bummed the first offer didn’t pan out, but Domingo keeps reminding me that “real money beats imaginary money.” An offer that doesn’t get through escrow isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. The final offer we accepted may not have been as nice, but it was above what we had originally paid. Even after all the fees we still made a profit in our home.

In actually, we really were quite lucky. We weren’t expecting to be make any profit when we first talked about moving. Domingo and I bought in 2008, when the market was declining but hadn’t reached it’s bottom yet. The neighboring houses sold for significantly less, dropping as much as 30%, just six months or so after we purchased. Most of our time in the house it looked like we would lose money when we moved. The question in our minds was just how much we would lose. I started interviewing January/February of 2013. That summer home prices finally started creeping up. Had we sold when we moved, we probably would have broken even when everything was said and done. Selling when we did we made a profit, but it’s not like we could have predicted that. We purchased when we got engaged, and were ready to move in together. We moved when it was clear our current location would not work with my new job, and sold as soon as we were ready to once moving out. We got lucky with the timing.

Posted in Family Life