The Tampa Home Affair

Well, we still don't have a signed contract for the home we're looking at in Tampa. Here's the link to the Realtor.com page for the house - the pictures on the inside don't really do it justice, because the previous owner's furniture is ugly. Trust me though - the house is really nice:

Here's what's happened so far: Last Monday, we put a ridiculous lowball offer in on the Tampa house, with the knowledge that we had a signed offer for Rainbarrel. Literally 10 minutes after we faxed the offer, our realtor in O' Fallon came back and said that our buyers were probably going to back out. Apparently, their inspector found cracks in the basement, which puts us in the 99.87% percent of all basements in the Midwest. Plus, there's no water in the basement, even though eight inches of snow and two inches of rain had recently fallen. Also, there were puddles of water in the backyard, which is an obvious indication of drainage problems after two weeks of snowstorms and rain saturating the earth. Monday ended with the Rainbarrel deal hanging by a thread.

On Tuesday, the sellers, through their relo company (Cartus - the same bunch of clowns handling our relo) came back with a silly counteroffer (like two grand less than the asking price). We decided to come back with an equally silly counter-counteroffer - we came up a little bit, plus we asked for 2% of the sales price back to cover closing costs and prepaids. So,our silly counter-counteroffer was basically a couple grand more than our original ridiculous lowball offer. I was hesitant to even come back with our counter, because it was so far off from the seller's counter. Later on Tuesday, we found out that the Rainbarrel deal was officially dead.

When we came back to Cartus, the idea was to stall, going back and forth with verbal counteroffers until we decided we were too far apart to move on the house. On Wednesday, however, the unexpected happened - Cartus accepted our silly counter-counteroffer! So, on Wednesday afternoon, we had to scramble to get our offer in writing to Cartus before the end of the day, and also figure out how we were going to come up with the rest of the money to close.

On Wednesday evening, I had an event for work, and I had assumed that once we had a verbal agreement and once Nina and I had signed the written contract, it was a mere formality for the other side to sign the contract. On the way home from the event, I called Mom and Dad to tell them the good news. Once I got home, Nina informed me that all we had was a verbal agreement, and Cartus wasn't going to sign the contract until the next day (Thursday) at the earliest.

Thursday came, and Cartus insisted on a typewritten offer, so of course we had to jump through hoops to sign that offer as well. Here's the process for signing documents right now: our realtor in Tampa faxes me the paperwork at work. I print out the paperwork, sign it, then fax it to Nina in Daytona. She signs it, then faxes it back to our realtor in Tampa, who then faxes it to the seller's agent. Assuming I'm at my desk at work, we can complete the entire process in about a half hour. Apparently, however, offers to Cartus have to go through some sort of bureaucratic corporate oversight thingy, so they're not nearly as efficient as we are in approving paperwork. Though we got the documents in on Thursday afternoon, Cartus still didn't produce a signed contract.

This put us into a bit of a bind. The next day was Friday, and we absolutely did not want this held over the long weekend. Having a pending offer gives the sellers a big advantage, as they can dangle our pending offer out as a negotiating tool if another buyer wanted to make an offer - that's the reason these contracts have an expiration date. When the offer came back to us typewritten, the expiration date was February 19th, which is Tuesday (tomorrow). Nina lined it out and wrote February 15th, which was last Friday. We made it clear to our realtor that we did not want this to span the weekend, that we wanted a signed offer by end of the day Friday.

Friday came, and as it turned out, the offer needed to be approved by the seller's company, who was paying for the relocation, since the offer was less than the buyout value. Plus, the hard deadline message to the seller's agent was filtered by our realtor, who wasn't nearly as aggressive as he should have been. So, Friday came and went without a signed offer.

So, here we are now. We think there's a pretty good chance that Cartus will finally sign the offer, but who knows for sure. We should hear something for certain by tomorrow.