SOLD!!!

It's been nearly one year since we first listed our house for sale, and I'm happy to report that as of today, we are the proud homeowners of only ONE house! WAHOO!

I can hardly believe our luck. We had the worst timing on this one. When we bought our new house without first selling the old, we had no idea what we were in for. We figured that we'd have the house on the market for at the most 6 months. Who would have known that the market was going to get crappier as the year went by? For the past few months, every time we've heard some market analyst talking about how bad things are, we'd get more and more stressed out.

CJ was really the 'rock' on this one. (as usual) He maintained that we'd just ride the market out, not get desperate, and hope that things would start to turn around. I was beyond impatient. The old house was like a monkey on my back and I couldn't help but obsess over it. Even though we weren't in financial trouble, it just felt so wrong to have that house sitting empty for so long. I think I reached maximum frustration when I wrote a check to the gas company for nearly $200 this winter to heat a house that was vacant. Oh, and during the summer last year, we would drive a half hour each week to mow the lawn....and I wasn't looking forward to another summer of double lawn work.

So as of today, the old house is sold, closed, and completely out of our hands now. I'm ecstatic! I loved that house and think the new homeowners will love it too. It was such a great first house, but I'm so happy to not be stressing about the local housing market anymore. Thank you to everyone who expressed your concern, love, and prayers for our situation over the past year. Here are a couple things that I've learned from the whole experience...

1. I think I'm going to let CJ make the next housing decision - I'm a little impulsive and this is what got us into the situation in the first place. We definitely could have waited to sell our house, and then bought now. If it was completely up to CJ, this is how we would have done it. We probably would have passed on the great house we have right now, but we could have gotten a great deal on a different house and bought in a buyer's market.
   
2. I don't think that we will ever hire a real estate agent again. In our opinion, real estate agents make WAY too much money for what they do. I don't want to offend any of my agent readers, but we were definitely not impressed with the representation we received...and we tried multiple different agents. We received a really good offer in December that we believe fell through because of our real estate agent. They make promises that they don't keep and sometimes they get in the way. In the end, they never really represent the buyer or the seller, and we feel that all of the agents we dealt with were on some level a little bit dishonest. And the thing about it, when do you ever pay someone 5-10 thousand dollars for a service to you? We figured that our previous agent had spent around 10 hours total listing our house. That means that they would have made over $700 per hour just to list our house if they would have sold it! In January, we'd had enough of our agent, and we opted to try to list it ourselves. We paid Lowes Flat Fee $500 to list our house on the MLS. We made and printed fliers, put the sign in the yard, got the realtor's lockbox, and handled all incoming offers and transactions ourselves. We got the same amount of showings that the last agent we had got, and we found that we were able to give/get better feedback from the agents showing our house. The entire process was so easy and we're really grateful to have been able to not pay an agent loads of money to sell our house. In this terrible market, we needed all of the help we could get, and we were able to list our house more competitively because we weren't paying an agent to list it.

Here are a couple of good resources I found when searching for our current house as well as getting advice on selling:

A great MLS search tool using Google Maps - http://earthpoint.us

A local real estate broker with some good advice and insights - http://www.boiseblog.com