House Hunt

Most people that read our blog have either been to our neighborhood or have heard about it from stories that I've told. So it won't come as a surprise to most of you that in the past 6 months on our street alone we've had a drive-by, an armed robbery, and an ice cream man that sells drugs. For these reasons and many more, Tim and I have been house hunting for quite a while. It feels like we've been looking for a year, but really it's only been about 5 months. People seem pretty surprised by how long it has taken us since it's a "buyer's market" or so we are told. My sister said we must be picky, which could be part of it, but I think it's also because we just have bad luck. We have put in offers on 4 different houses so far, and are waiting to here back on house #4.
House #1 was in Herriman. When we pulled up the comparisons for other houses in the neighborhood we felt like this one was way overpriced. We offered $10,000 under the asking price, plus $4,000 in closing costs. The sellers, who didn't have a Realtor and were selling the home themselves, counter offered at $1,000 under their asking price with no closing costs included. We thought that was pretty pathetic, so we decided to keep looking.
House #2 was in South Jordan. This was a short sale, which the listing agent failed to mention until the last minute. We offered $20,000 under the asking price and the seller counter offered at $10,000 under his asking price. We accepted and were told that we were now under contract. That's also when we were told that it was a short sale so it would be going through the foreclosure process mid-October, which could take anywhere from 3 to 12 months. So we sadly gave up on that one.
House #3 was in Herriman. It was a foreclosure, so it had already been through the long process in which the bank appraises it and a bunch of other stuff I don't know about. The tricky thing about these is that the bank usually puts the list price fairly low, so you have to go up a little higher if you want your offer to be competitive. When we found this house it had only been on the market for 4 days and already had 4 offers. We put in our offer for $10,000 above the asking price. We were told a couple of weeks ago that the bank accepted another offer.
House #4 is in Herriman, and is also a foreclosure. When I found this house it had only been on the market for 2 days. We looked at it on a Friday evening, and on Monday morning we were in our Realtor's office writing up an offer. The listing agent told us that they had received 3 offers so far, so that wasn't very comforting. By the next Monday we still hadn't heard anything back from them, but we did know that they contacted our loan officer to verify what we qualified for. We feel pretty good about it, but we don't want to get our hopes up too much until we know it is a guarantee. In the contract we set our closing date for December 20, so if all goes well we could be in a home by Christmas!
I will keep everyone updated, and if it works out I will post pictures.