Ha, ha!

During the great house hunt of 2010, Hans and I really liked this house.

It's a great house, mostly for the location. It's on the end of a cul-de-sac and backs up to a green belt. Very quiet, very wooded. It's a good size floor plan and the location is slightly more accessible than our house.

But the woman selling it played hard ball, and lost. And Hans and I still enjoy a private chuckle about it every once in a while.

The woman had the house listed much higher than we were willing to go, and much higher than we thought the house was worth. Nothing (and I do mean nothing) in the house has been updated since it was built, so it needed a lot of work. The kitchen in particular was horrifying.

So small and dingy and.. blah. We planned to gut the kitchen and re-do it, if we got this house. So we made an offer accordingly. We wanted to pay about $10k less than her asking price, so we offered her $15k less, hoping to negotiated to where we wanted to be. Her counter offer was just $1k below her asking price. That's not even a counter offer, lady.

But fortunately for us, the circumstances were heavily in our favor. Her house had been on the market for seven months, with no offers (that shoulda been her first clue her price was too high). She had already moved and the house was sitting vacant. It didn't show well... On top of that, her realtor told us that she needed to get the house sold by the end of April so that she could buy a new house and get the Obama tax credit before it expired.

We figured we'd wait her out. Let her sweat. We'd always said from the beginning that if we didn't find the house we wanted for the price we wanted, we'd just walk away. We weren't in a situation where we *had* to buy.

While we waited for her to get nervous, we looked at other houses. We found our house and loved it, but didn't think the woman would accept our low offer. So we put offers in on both houses, the last weekend in April. Both came back and accepted them straight out, not even counter offering for higher. At this point, we'd fallen in love with our house. While the location isn't as awesome, the layout is better and it needed far less work. Sorry lady, you snoozed. You lost.

I got curious, so I checked the MLS to see if her house ever sold. And because I like to gloat a little that she made a bad gamble, and we ended up the better for it. And check it out!

Not only is her house still for sale, she's come almost $20k off her price. Bet she wishes she would have accepted our offer now.... Muahahaha!