On Thursday I received a voice message from a real estate agent saying they found my for sale by owner listing on Zillow.com for our old house on Hillside Circle. 

I planned to have Tim Andreoli list the house for us, but I decided to put it for sale by owner to see if we got any interest until our tenants moved out and we were able to get in, clean it up and take some good photos to list it properly.

Honestly I wasn’t expecting much and I certainly wasn’t going to get my hopes up. I didn’t even take her phone call very seriously.

I returned her call and talked with the Lusks to allow them to go through. I warned them that they were getting ready to move and it was not in a condition to show.

It turns out she really like the home and the agent come over today and presented us with an offer.

I listed the house for $289,000. That is the price we purchased it for 4 1/2 years ago. I figured we would start there and drop the price $10,000 each month until it sells.

The offer we got today was for $285,000. It was conditional that we repair the deck up to $5100. Install new carpet up to $6000. Pay for the buyer’s closing costs $5000, and pay the agent’s commission of 3%. It was all expenses I had anticipated. There are a few other costs as well for the the title company and to pay for a home warranty.

After getting the offer I put together a spreadsheet to calculate all the fees. It looks like we would get about $41,000 from the sale.

I then added up things we needed to do with that money:

Pay back Ken & Laura $9,600
Pay off credit cards $10,274
Emergency fund $10,000
Gleevec 2014 $5,000 

With all that it left us with $6,100.

We were very excited. But after thinking about it and talking with Emily who represented us as our agent in the past, we decided to counter offer and get the full asking price of $289,000, which would give us about $4,000 more.

We haven’t heard back yet. In hindsight I’m thinking we should have just accepted the offer. I would sleep better tonight. Because really, this saves us more than $4,000 because we don’t need to hire an agent and pay for the seller agent commissions. Plus, it saves us from doing a lot of extra work like cleaning up the yard.

We probably won’t heard back from them until Monday. I hope they accept the counter, but if they don’t, I hope they are at least interested enough in their original offer that we can move forward. This really was a great blessing!

Today was also ward temple day. Rachel and I were asked to be the witness couple again. I was just so thankful the whole time we were there for what happened this morning.

Afterwards there was an ice cream social at the Kemeny’s home. Since it was next door and because we sent our babysitter home, we took the kids with us and they enjoyed some ice cream as well.

We finished the day by putting up the projector and watching a movie on the big wall in our living room.

All in all, a great day!