Bidding on New House

If you have been keeping up on the Flickr site you will see two different houses posted there. As excited as we were about the Chehalis house we have decided not to get it. The mortgage payments would be to high for us to be comfortable with all the unknowns we will be facing once we get moved back, Mark's commute to & from Alaska for work being the biggest concern as well as the age of the house (built in 1930, that's an OLD house!). Also there was no way we could afford this place (until it sells) AND the Chehalis house. The idea is to find a house there with payments low enough that we can pay for BOTH places just in case this one takes a long time to sell. So we continued the search.

Mark found the listing for the Raymond house early Monday morning, (6/13) It isn't very much land but it is enough considering the location and that the house was built in 2007!! This property does not offer as much as the Chehalis property but it is almost new & at a listing price of $83,500.00, it will definitely work for us! 


At this point I need to back up just a bit. This is not the first house we have been interested in at this price range. In our earlier searches we did find a Realtor to work with but the houses in this price range (and in a reasonable living condition) sell really fast! Being out of state we just couldn't act fast enough to get a hold of them. Consequently that ends up being a good thing!

Anyway, so when we found this listing, it had only been on the market 4 days. Knowing how quickly these houses sell, we made the decision and started making calls. Turns out our Realtor quit for some other job and referred us to the gal that would be taking over his clients. To make a long frustrating story short, it turns out that this is a HUD house & she didn't want to be bothered with it AND of course she didn't tell us that till the next morning! So... what is a HUD house anyway, & why is it such a big deal?

HUD is a government owned program to help lower income & disabled people with their homes through cheep loans & grants. As with regular homes, if the people still can't make their payments the home is repossessed. Only instead of going back to a bank they go back to the government. These houses then go back on the market and sold through a kind of auction. As with all government institutions there is a lot of hoops & red tape but it turns out to not be that big of a deal! Actually this turns out to be a really great way to get a nice place for way under the market value! The drawback is that the buyer can only make a one time bid and there is no way of knowing if someone else has bid higher. Also bidding is only open for a short time, so everything has to be done very quickly.

With our homework done we set out to find a realtor who knows about the HUD houses and would work with us. By Tuesday afternoon we found a realtor, Wednesday the bid was submitted. We got our pre-qualification done and all the papers sent UPS to the realtor. Now we wait.

In the mean time we will gather all the additional information the bank requires to complete the loan process. In the case of the HUD home the actual loan from the bank will only proceed if we get the bid, and even though we are pre-qualified that does not guaranty we will get the loan. That was scary, but the loan officer said it looked good & we shouldn't have any trouble.


The realtor said we should know about the auction by Monday. Then we have to wait for the bank. Hopefully that wont be more that a couple of days and we should know if we for sure got the house by the end of next week. 


We are not thinking of a moving time line at the moment, only that the last ferry out of Alaska is Sept. 30th. And the ferry is not our only moving option either. If we get the HUD house (or something else in that price range) we can afford both places for a short time and that will give us even more options. What it comes down to is that we need a place to move to first, then we will make decisions on when & how. 


OK so now you are all up to date. I will be posting on here a lot the next few weeks. Not only house & moving up dates but also, it is summer in Alaska! The Kings are in with the reds not far behind them. Even though we might get really busy with the move, we will still be taking advantage of our last Alaskan summer fishing season! 


We will see you all real soon!