December 11, 2007

Bit of background....

Seems like forever since we bought the place back in August and naturally as soon as I get set up to post on the site work has had me here at all hours !

So just a bit of back ground......after several months of looking, losing out on other places, we eventually closed in August. Fortunately the seller moved the closing forward just in time to miss the major hike in jumbo loan moves over the summer. We used a combination of brokers and websites to play lenders off against each other to drive the fees and rates down. Next big challenge was to sell our condo. That was also in park slope in a relatively well established block so we sold it ourselves based on closing prices from a month earlier. It all went pretty well, which was great news as that saved us 4% commision which was the lowest a broker offered. Couple of open houses based on posts on NYTimes.com did the trick.

We had an engineers report done and to be honest I didn't think it was that great. Still - the engineer did point out a few things which we used to lower the price. Admittedly only 30 cents on the dollar but better money in our pocket than the seller and this did give us some peace of mind that the place wasn't going to fall apart the day we moved in.

Closing costs ! We had calculated these previously but it didn't make me feel any better when we had to pay them. We sold our apartment for @700k and bought the new house for @1.4m and the fees were approx 60k. Just the price of doing this type of business I guess.

I dont know how we didn't notice it at the walk through but the house was filthy when we moved in. The contract calls from broom clean but in no way was it. We also found out that we had no end of little house guests in the form of a mouse infestation and water bugs. Terminx guy came round and within a couple of weeks we had killed over 30 of the damn things. No sightings recently and the moniker of "mouse mansion" seems to be a thing of the past.

Posted by 10thStreetReno at 10:00 PM | Comments (5)

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