After closing the sale of our house, my mother and I started searching through all sorts of real estate online and with multiple realty apps. We weren't making much headway after nearly a month and I ended up requesting assistance from a company that seemed to deliver better results yet still wasn't providing what I needed. A representative got back to me very quickly and I was assigned and agent who spoke with me the next day. The difference between this agent and the agent who sold my house was like night and day. my new agent was friendly, helpful communicative, patient, didn't fault us, didn't put us down, didn't lie to us, didn't pretend to be my mother with contacting other people, and wasn't abrasive. I wish I had someone like her as my first agent.
While my agent did regularly check for possible homes, my mother and I each made efforts to pour through the search multiple times a day. We learned that real estate moves slowly during holiday weekends, that patience is critical, that losing a bid on a home doesn't mean that we won't get one, that this is more like an ugly auction head game and nothing like a supermarket (first come, first serve), and while we were pretty certain, we firmly realized we hope to never go through this again. I must have completed ten virtual tours easily, if not more. All too often something was revealed duri8ng the virtual tours that had not been made obvious when reading about the homes and viewing the photos and/or using the 3d walkthroughs. Often steps weren't fully revealed, doorways weren't featured well, the beginnings and endings of flights of stairs... Things I had to know about because my mother is in a wheelchair and cannot merely use stairs or squeeze through any doorway. Event to accommodate a dwelling, I would need to know that there is sufficient space available to adapt certain areas for handicapped living.
I had to stay within a fixed price for purchasing a house in order to match a safety budget for my mother since an amount from the sale of you previous home was to replenish my mother's retirement. Even searching out in the middle of nowhere was providing us with some discouraging results: some places were ugly. some were cramped, some were overpriced for their size... It felt like for each possible house I found interesting, I found at lease five others that immediately didn't suit our needs. This was a very frustrating part of the search. Another frustrating aspect was trying to keep everything sorted in my head because it was all starting to blend together; sometimes I had to compare houses on like for several minutes to ensure I was considering the right place.
Finally we found something we liked that even the agent volunteered to say that it was one of the best places we had looked at. The pictures looked decent, the data was good, most of everything was already good enough for handicapped living and featured some options we liked as well. The e-tour went well. The agent took some measurements for me so that I knew which passages needed alteration and which could not be adjusted so we could determine whether to go with this or not. We bit the bullet and decided to bid on the house with the realtor's recommendations. Someone else was the higher bidder, but we waived so many options and inspections, it made out bid more appealing to the seller. We won the bid and closed the transaction in June 2021. Unfortunately, we did have to wait on the seller vacating the premises can that has cost us more money and time as well as waiting to make other preparations. Now comes the process of setting up various utilities and a plethora of of things to- some of which will be done right away while others with take time...
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