Prepping « Robin Writes

Good grief. Realtors are nuts—apologies to those I know. I’ve seen so many listings with either no pictures, pictures of neighboring property, or artistic pictures which look pretty but tell you nothing. Also, if a realtor doesn’t give an address, it’s really flippin’ hard to find on Google or wherever.

And clients. Sheesh. We made an offer on that property I talked about last week, a verbal one; no sense in doing reams of paperwork if the seller isn’t interested. Sheesh. Yes, I said it again.

So here’s what happened:

We told our agent to make the offer at $1,000 per acre. I’m not stupid, I researched first, and what I came up with was that land in that area averaged $975 an acre. By the way, the asking price was $65,000, or $1,548.

It took 10 days for the seller to respond. Hello? Email? Whatever. She said it was too low to counter, that other properties were around $1,700 per acre, it was “cleared,” and besides, it was “beautiful.”

Yeah, so?

Realtors, you know the drill—people have attachments to their homes and land, they think it’s awesome, etc., etc. I clearly remember a house we looked at a few years ago that boasted “new carpet!” It was bright blue. Bright. Blue. Hideous, to probably everyone but the seller.

Well, this chick is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. “Beauty” has little to do with the value; the picturesque barn is a white elephant; “cleared” is not the same thing as two small tracts of pasture. And yes, the price is too high—it’s been on the market for six months. The property she thinks is comparable has usable outbuildings, or wells, or septic, etc.

Well, in the interests of buying a piece of property now, because we’re running behind schedule, we upped it to $50K with a formal offer. Guess what? We can’t do that until the listing agent re-ups it on the MLS. The listing expired. Go figure. The agent is a 20-something who appears to be working for Daddy. Fine, just do the damn job. And quit taking those artsy-fartsy pictures!

We made some decisions this past weekend:

First, there are way too many properties for sale to possibly look at them all.

Second, we could certainly make the barn property work.

And third, with so much work to do, regardless of the property we choose, we really need to get moving on it. And, well, fourth, it can be difficult to search in the winter!

Since the first of September, we’ve driven to/walked over/looked at approximately 30 acreages listed for sale. That’s a lot of driving—oh, a couple thousand miles—and hiking (did not measure that!). I really did think it would be easier and quicker to find what we’re looking for, but I do have a tendency to say, “Gee, what’s over that NEXT hill?” So it’s time to stop.

The barn property is in a good location, decent-looking properties/neighbors in the area, good road in, one-third pasture, and 42 acres with a creek. I’m not going to count that barn, because, even being over 50 years old, the thing’s a hazard. It does have electric, though.

The point is that we can make it work; I can picture it, all the details. And I want to get started.

Which brings me to the third point: all the stuff to be done. Driveway, well, outhouse/septic, pond, fencing, outbuildings, cabin. This is going to take a while, especially since we’re looking mostly at weekends and over the summer—we do still have a kid in school, even though work, for us, is pretty flexible. So I want to get going on this HUGE project!

Which brings me back to winter:

I’m not a fan of driving after dark—and if you saw some of these roads, you’d totally get it—so we’ve got only about 10 hours of daylight, and that includes driving time; that limits the number of places we can check out in any given day. Plus, precipitation is unpredictable, so there’s that. On the other hand, you can definitely see the lay of the land when the trees are bare . . . but there’s mud, snow, ice, etc. And I’m pretty sure AAA has never been to a lot of these places!

So we made a tentative, verbal offer of $1K per acre. That’s slightly above the average listing price for property in that area, but we’ve been told the owner had had a similar offer and declined. Personally, I think she’s asking too much, but we have a little wiggle room. A little.

Why verbal? Well, why do all the paperwork, etc., if the owner is going to say no? Efficient, yes?

And now we wait. We can go up a bit, but we can also move on and continue to look. We do have a few backup properties, and there are always more . . . over that next hill.