Some background
We had an awesome house, in a great town, but given our financial situation and ambitions for the future it made sense in many ways for us to change houses.
Because my husband still works for someone else right now, we have family nearby, and access to many amenities we enjoy, we were hoping to stay in the area while also lowering our costs and obligations. Generally, we were looking to find something a bit more practical and better suited for our needs.
We looked around quite a bit last year, scouring the online market and visiting a few place in person. We seriously considered a few, but they were either not the right fit or required us to sell before buying.
It begins
We saw a house come online in the summer that was priced low for the area because it was owned by HUD.* It was quite an old home, about 20 miles away, in a tiny unincorporated town. At the time, we asked to see it, but the Realtor took forever to get back to us and we never worked it out before the house was sold and off the market. We didn’t think any more about it.
Then my husband noticed it had come back on the market just around the new year! It was priced even lower, had just a few pictures that weren’t the most enticing, and it seemed like such a long shot. I’m so glad he convinced me to take a look! We asked our Realtor to show it to us, and even though it was outside the area he normally serves and was not the kind of thing we had told him we’d likely be pursuing, he agreed to set it up.
In the next post, seeing the house for the first time – in complete darkness!
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*That means it’s a repossession on a house that was purchased with an FHA loan. Once the owners defaulted it was then owned by the federal government’s Housing and Urban Development department.