And on the 12th Day of Christmas

we signed the contract for a new house!

I suppose it is nice to know that there are at least a couple of people who still get holidays and vacations off from work, namely, the listing agent of the house in question, and the people in charge of that house at the relocation company. It took from Dec 23 to Jan 4 to get any kind of a response on our offer. It might be noted that patience is not my strong suit.

On Tuesday afternoon, we finally had a few back and forth rounds of counter-offers, but the workday ended before we'd found a price. Wednesday came and went with our latest offer still on their table. Nada.

Finally, Thursday, Jan 6, around 2:30, our agent called us with the relocation company's final offer. It was a little higher than we'd wanted, but it was ultimately acceptable to us (we'll see how the appraiser feels about it).

Now, the challenge became getting an executed contract! On Friday, the listing agent contacted our agent - there were pages from the relocation company that we hadn't initialed. Fine. Roy met the two agents at a Starbucks and initialed all of the pages that had no indication they needed to be initialed, like all of the pictures that their inspector had taken in Oct.

Then...back to silence. And more silence. Our neighbor informed us that some real estate agent was still showing people the house after we'd agreed to price. Was the company negotiating with other potential buyers and stalling for time?

And more silence from the Seller. (I'm pretty sure that our agent is tired of hearing from me each and every day.) Finally, when I got home Monday night at 5:30, it was to a message on the answering machine that we had an executed contract!

The listing agent had (prematurely) had the house de-winterized for inspection last Friday, since the inspection has to take place in the 7 day "inspection period" (relocation companies get to write the rules in real estate contracts, isn't that interesting?) immediately following the execution of the contract, rather than the normal 10 day "option period" in Texas. Since we're buying the home "AS IS", the inspections are basically just a CYA for anything major , and we will have the Home Service Protection program to fall back on should we need it. Which is good, as we won't be able to test the A/C, since it won't get above 50 for the entire week! And I'm sure that the listing agent is sweating the de-winterization of the house with all of the nasty weather headed our way. She'll get to winterize it again tomorrow afternoon.

The HAR listing for the property shows the house and grounds as they are today pretty nicely. Although it doesn't feature a picture of the fan with the broken off blade, for some reason. :)

Our closing date in the contract was set for 2/7/11. Since the seller kept screwing around with delays, there is no way we can make that date-30 days came and went last Friday. Now we have to amend the contract to set the Closing Date for 2/16/11. We'll sign that paperwork tomorrow (Tue) and then the Seller has to sign it, too.

Our loan originator has been waiting for the contract...and waiting...and waiting. We did lock our rate on Friday, though. We and our lender have everything lined up and ready to head to the processor to start that process.

But, happy, happy! We have an executed contract, we'll have the house inspected tomorrow and sign the contract extension paperwork, then we should be on our merry way to CrazyLand.