House Hunting: Houses 1 & 2 of Round 1

Our excitement about moving to Elk Grove and buying a home were somewhat dashed after our first round of house hunting this weekend. To say we are getting a crash course in Real Estate 101 is an understatement.

Saturday started off early. We were supposed to meet our realtor, Kim, in Elk Grove at 10 AM, so we needed to leave the house around 8. We didn’t actually leave until 8:45. Luckily, Kim was running behind too and throughout the drive this time changed to 11:30. The extra time allowed us time to drive around the area and get to know our new town. This is how we got to know Fremont when we first moved here. Elk Grove may be over 100 years old, but it definitely has the feel of a new town – every store and shopping center is recently opened or in the process of being built. And, as we drove into Elk Grove on back roads from the south, we discovered that Lewis and Clark are buried in a small, historic graveyard in the 1-block town of Franklin.

Once the house hunting began, the excitement dissolved into fear. You have to understand this: most homes on the market in Elk Grove are either short sales, which is the step before foreclosure or they have already been foreclosed on and are bank owned. When its bank owned, the house comes as is, you can’t negotiate new paint or major fixes into the terms of the sale. You can barely get your 3% closing costs covered. If the previous residents left anything behind, you inherit it.

We’d been warned that short sales are tough and can actually take a long time to go through as you are often dealing with the previous owner’s lender or in most instances, lenders, so an offer first has to be accepted by lender #1 to cover to previous owner’s mortgage #1 and once that goes through deal with lender #2 accepting an offer to cover the previous owner’s mortgage #2, which often served as the previous owner’s down payment.

House 1:

Kim selected only bank-owned homes to show us and on this day, there were only 4 that were in the area we wanted and at the price we want. The first home, the code didn’t work so we couldn’t even get in, but most of the yard was in the front, and having little to no backyard will not work for us or Melody.

House 2:

The second home looked promising from the outside. It had some nice bushes, including roses in the front, along with a nice front patio. There were some half hanging Christmas lights up, but that could easily be fixed. Once we got inside, the true story unfolded. The place was disgusting, filthy! It wasn’t like this was dust settling over time, disgruntled evictee filth either. This was “Do people really live in these condition?” filthy. Obviously, these people didn’t know what a vacuum was. All in all, the house needed a good $20,000 to make it livable. The carpets have to be replaced, some new stucco on walls is necessary as well as a new coat of paint just to make the place livable. There was industrial glue spilt on the carpet in the master bedroom. Then you get to the backyard where there had obviously been some sort of structure, but the previous owners had taken it and left behind the cemented in bases. The backyard also had an interesting fence, one that allowed you to look out past it and passersby on the road across the little stream to view in. It was the type of fence you’d expect in the front yard of a mansion. The backyard looked first to this little stream, which was quaint and inviting and then at the local high school – not my idea of a nice view or relaxing.

I was so shocked at the condition of this home I forgot I had brought my camera to take pictures! Be glad I didn’t take pictures of this or the next house.

Love always,
Sarah