So, here's the situation: Baboo and I found this house, well actually he found it, while were out trail running. It backs up to "open space" which is localspeak for designated park land.It's a good house for us, since we'll be empty nesters in a couple months. It's single story, smaller, which I'm wild about, but nice with recent updates inside. Best of all, it's right off the trail where we like to run, and has a large backyard - did you know Baboo likes to garden? I love, love, love to watch him putter around the garden, putting out birdseed and such. I've missed that in our current house, which has a little walled back yard that is about 20 feet wide and 15 feet deep and COMPLETELY surrounded, mostly by people who don't care about back yards, and are satisfied to just have a back yard full of sand and tumbleweeds.
So anyway.
So this house. Well, it's also about 9 miles from work. We currently live across the Rio Grand about 23 miles away. There are four roads that cross the Rio Grande from home to the VA, so as you can guess, it's about a 45 minute drive, at best.
We did some digging, and figured out that the owners probably originally built it back in the 80s. So maybe they are sentimental, which might explain whey the owners have priced it about 45% above current market value. My wise, analytical husband found out that in this zip code, of all the houses that have sold what the average price per square foot is.
Pricing
that high up over is not the way to move a house these days, folks, because I'm telling you that just in Albuquerque alone, a city of just under 500,000 people, there are over 2800 homes on the market, and those are just the ones listed with agents.So Saturday, we made an offer. It was based on the average price per square foot of recently sold homes in the area, with an additional 25% thrown in for the fact that it borders open space. 2 hours before the deadline, we were asked for extra time, as the owners had been gone all weekend, and said they wanted to comp homes that had sold locally and were near open space so that they could see about a counter offer.
Our realtor did that for us and and sent the results.
There were four.
They average price per square foot was below what we'd offered.
We also know that ours is the first offer they've gotten in the over 70 days the house has been listed.
So, we are waiting to see if they are serious about selling the house or not.
I want this house. We, want this house. It's nice and clean and updated and in a decent little neighborhood. I can totally see myself in it. I love the idea of running, literally, through a small gate in my back yard and hitting some good running trails. I might even get a mountain bike if it call comes together. But we're not going to be stupid about it.
So have you ever bid on something on ebay and then waited, waited, waited?
This is like that. But way more exciting/terrifying/fearful/fullofdreadandworry.
What will they say? What will they do? They can just say no and hold out, if they want.
Aaaggghhh! I hate waiting. I'm just not very good at it.
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