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Buyer Diaries

Follow Heather on her exciting journey to home ownership!

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The process continues

It has been a week or so since my last post and things are moving forward with our house. The seller (the bank) finally signed back our contract so our lender could finally get started working on securing our loan. Even though we got pre-approved there was still a ton of paperwork we had to [...]

Heather's First Time Home Buyer Diary
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The Home Inspection

Whew! Our home inspection is over and it went really well! Of course there is a laundry list of things we need to repair, but nothing major (or too expensive). So now we really are just steps away from buying our first home! Because this house was built in 1934 and is mostly wood, I [...]

Find out how Heather's home inspection went!
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Offer Accepted!

So much can happen in one week! The bank countered our last offer and after a little more negotiation we all agreed to the terms. (yay!) The only problem is that the bank would only give us a verbal commitment. Apparently this is very common from the bank owned homes, so we readily accepted. After [...]

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The waiting game

So the bank rejected our last offer as well as the first offer. No counter, no negotiations just another flat out refusal. This would be so much easier if they would just counter! In any case we submitted our third offer 35k higher than our first and just 4k shy of their asking price. Maybe [...]

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Bad News

Well, we submitted our offer to the bank, on the house we really liked, and then waited several days. As mentioned previously we were prepared for the wait, bank owned homes can take a long time to get a response from. But on day four (well, actually 2 business days) we got an answer. The bank completely refused our offer! They didn’t even counter just flat out refused. I guess they respond pretty quickly when the answer is NO.

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Our First Offer

Well, we finished looking at all of the homes Jose and Claudia found for us. And we were a little torn between one in Altamonte (great location, but the house had no character) and the two historic homes in Sanford (lot’s of character!). Jose had looked into the two in Sanford and found that our first choice had issues running much more deep than cosmetic. It also had 2 offers on it already. Disappointed, my husband and I decided to scratch that one off the list. Bank owned homes sometimes go into bidding wars when more than one offer has been submitted and given the amount of work this particular house would need we just decided it was better to walk away.

Thumbnail image for The Hunt for our First Home In Orlando

The Hunt for our First Home In Orlando

We finally sat down with Jose and Claudia and went over what we are looking for in our first home. Like many first time home-buyers in the Orlando area, we were under the impression that with so many homes on the market, the process would be relatively easy. Wrong. Because we want to close on [...]

Thumbnail image for Buying our First Home: Getting Started

Buying our First Home: Getting Started

I have been a renter for the last 4 years, my husband is a lifer. He is from France and has a very European idea about home ownership, in other words, it is just not that important to him. After years of going back and forth about what we should do, we have finally decided [...]

Orlando First Time Home Buyer Diary Chapter 1
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