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About a week after returning from New York, we realized that there just wasn't any prspective buyers interested in seeing the place. It was kinda odd, considering how much time we had spent keeping the place clean and neat on the off-chance that people would come calling. The market had died right down and so we had also gotten lazy in keeping the place spic-and-span.
About a week ago, we had someone come by, and so we did a fairly decent cleanup, but it doesn't take long to make a mess from absolute cleanliness. It really threw us for a loop when, while we had our friend Mike over, that we got a call around 4:40pm, asking if someone could come take a look at the place sometime between 6:30 and 7:30. We knew that we had asked for a 2-hour minimum window, but even so, that was kinda pushing it, even for us. Christine pushed the vacuum around a bit, I cleaned the windows, and we basically left everything else as-is.
Imagine our surprise when, after frying some french-fries, burning some oil, and generally making a smoky kitchen (which resulted in opening the front door a crack to let the air through) that we hear a timid voice from the other side of the open-a-crack door at 5:45, asking if they were a bit early. (I'll say! That's technically only one hour's turnaround.) Good thing the place was in a decent position that we just packed-up and went for dinner. It wasn't perfect but it was decent.
We went out to a local Sushi restaurant which had been open for only a couple of months (I can't even find a wesbite for the company, it's that small) and had a brilliantly filling meal, considering that my dinner consisted of a "Whirl Roll" of only 5 pieces of sushi. ^^
We came back, and didn't find a business card left behind, which we didn't find odd as many of the people who have shown the place have followed the same idea and not told us who they were. It's frustrating to not know who just wandered through your home. But so many showings resulted in that, so we figured they came, they left, end of story.
I sent off an e-mail to my real estate agent when we got back asking if we can change the advance-notice time to 24 hours. Imagine my surprise when he calls me back around 9:30 that night, not to talk about the 24-hour notice question, but to state that they're putting together an offer, and that we should head on over to his offices to hammer out the deal. !!
We meet-up at his office down the street (at the new Shops at Don Mills, nice, swanky offices!) and we anxiously await for their fax to come in. Now I don't know about you, but Real Estate seems to be all about the old, antiquated fax system. There are digital signatures now, and e-mail, and so many more effective technologies than using a fax, and this was evidence of that. They had trouble faxing us their offer, and when we wanted to fax our counter-offer back, their fax machine wouldn't pick up the phone. Our machine, being up-to-date, even allowed an e-mail function so we e-mailed our counter-offer back to the other realtor at her suggestion, but apparently that was no good for her since we we actually ended up using a different fax number anyways, and even then, we verbally agreed over the phone on the stipulations that we outlined, and our counter-offer was accepted.
To be honest, I wasn't expecting the offer to come in - both as quickly as it did, on top of not expecting it at all. After almost three months, I had just come to terms that the place was not moving and it wasn't going to sell until March, when the school season was over. It seems evident that this purchase was for a student, as the prospective buyers looked young, and apparently the other realtor I'm dealing with lives in my building, so she knows how the place handles and it's likely going to a student who needed a place for a college nearby.
So yeah, looking into finding a new place to live now! On that note, there's a pair of places in that townhouse community that we were looking at a few months back, and one of them is owned by my realtor's boss, so I may be able to swing some kind of deal... wouldn't that be nice.
About a week ago, we had someone come by, and so we did a fairly decent cleanup, but it doesn't take long to make a mess from absolute cleanliness. It really threw us for a loop when, while we had our friend Mike over, that we got a call around 4:40pm, asking if someone could come take a look at the place sometime between 6:30 and 7:30. We knew that we had asked for a 2-hour minimum window, but even so, that was kinda pushing it, even for us. Christine pushed the vacuum around a bit, I cleaned the windows, and we basically left everything else as-is.
Imagine our surprise when, after frying some french-fries, burning some oil, and generally making a smoky kitchen (which resulted in opening the front door a crack to let the air through) that we hear a timid voice from the other side of the open-a-crack door at 5:45, asking if they were a bit early. (I'll say! That's technically only one hour's turnaround.) Good thing the place was in a decent position that we just packed-up and went for dinner. It wasn't perfect but it was decent.
We went out to a local Sushi restaurant which had been open for only a couple of months (I can't even find a wesbite for the company, it's that small) and had a brilliantly filling meal, considering that my dinner consisted of a "Whirl Roll" of only 5 pieces of sushi. ^^
We came back, and didn't find a business card left behind, which we didn't find odd as many of the people who have shown the place have followed the same idea and not told us who they were. It's frustrating to not know who just wandered through your home. But so many showings resulted in that, so we figured they came, they left, end of story.
I sent off an e-mail to my real estate agent when we got back asking if we can change the advance-notice time to 24 hours. Imagine my surprise when he calls me back around 9:30 that night, not to talk about the 24-hour notice question, but to state that they're putting together an offer, and that we should head on over to his offices to hammer out the deal. !!
We meet-up at his office down the street (at the new Shops at Don Mills, nice, swanky offices!) and we anxiously await for their fax to come in. Now I don't know about you, but Real Estate seems to be all about the old, antiquated fax system. There are digital signatures now, and e-mail, and so many more effective technologies than using a fax, and this was evidence of that. They had trouble faxing us their offer, and when we wanted to fax our counter-offer back, their fax machine wouldn't pick up the phone. Our machine, being up-to-date, even allowed an e-mail function so we e-mailed our counter-offer back to the other realtor at her suggestion, but apparently that was no good for her since we we actually ended up using a different fax number anyways, and even then, we verbally agreed over the phone on the stipulations that we outlined, and our counter-offer was accepted.
To be honest, I wasn't expecting the offer to come in - both as quickly as it did, on top of not expecting it at all. After almost three months, I had just come to terms that the place was not moving and it wasn't going to sell until March, when the school season was over. It seems evident that this purchase was for a student, as the prospective buyers looked young, and apparently the other realtor I'm dealing with lives in my building, so she knows how the place handles and it's likely going to a student who needed a place for a college nearby.
So yeah, looking into finding a new place to live now! On that note, there's a pair of places in that townhouse community that we were looking at a few months back, and one of them is owned by my realtor's boss, so I may be able to swing some kind of deal... wouldn't that be nice.
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Real Estate deals are arcane and anachronistic and horrifying. Seriously, it's the 21st century, and this is how I'm treated when I want to spend an appalling amount of money?! Oh hell no! *ahem*
Good luck on the search! ^_^
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