Thursday, December 02, 2004

Buying a house in Toronto - Part IV

Wow, part IV, like it's "A New Hope" or something... So with offer in the works, our agents worked furiously trying to contact the seller's agent and to setup a face-to-face presentation of the offer. The idea is that it's harder to laugh in someone's face than it is to a piece of paper. Once the offer is set into place, if accepted, we only have five days to get everything sorted out: financing, insurance, lawyers, house inspection, etc. So we spent most of the day trying to get a jump on all that paper work. Our agents managed to co-ordinate a face-to-face meeting for around 7:30... so the plan was to meet a nearby restaurant, sign some more formalized documents (a zillion times times four), and then have dinner while they negotiated. However, when we arrived at the restaurant, the seller couldn't contact his wife in time, and she went somewhere with their kids for a few hours. Since they both owned the house, they both needed to be there. She wasn't expected home until around 9:30. All this meant was that our pins-and-needles tension would only be dragged out longer than we expected. We had dinner, went home and sat by the phone and waited. Around 10pm, the phone rang. There were a couple things that had to be hammered out, ranging from the price to the alarm system. They had come down a little bit in the price, which was expected. Interestingly, they were waiting to sell the house before they started looking for a new home -- so they wanted additional time on the closing date. As first time house buyers, this was to our advantage. Now the ball was in our court; we only had an hour to decide. We could come up as much as they had come down, and that could go two ways: we would probably have another round of back-n-forth, or it would piss 'em off and they'd refuse our counter-offer. If we could pick the right psychological number, they'd be more inclined. We came up to the lower half of the halfway point, pushed the closing date out.... and waited for our agents to call us back. Around 11:30, the phone rang again, the offer had been accepted. According to our agents, the husband wanted to sell the house and his wife didn't. They hadn't begun to look for a house yet, and were waiting to see if they could sell the house before Christmas. As soon as the offer was accepted, she went white as a ghost and began to ball her eyes out. The only thing left was the house-inspection...