Kristen and I apologize for being absent from this blog. We were in the throws of moving in and let’s just say it has been a whirl wind! Well, we finally managed to get a video of the new digs for the internet world to see so here it is! Hopefully this gives you a better idea of how the home is laid out and we can’t wait to update you on all the changes we intend to make to this place – after we do all the fixes we need to do! So here’s our house… enjoy!
We moved from Massachusetts to Indiana in 2014 and knew quite literally no one. Fast forward a year later, we knew a couple more people but were still pretty green about all things Indy. When we decided to get a home, we didn’t know any great realtors, online reviews were spotty at best and so we found our realtor on Zillow. We picked one with good reviews and who was a “premier agent” with a healthy number of sales. Would we do that again? Probably not. You see, realtors on Zillow pay to advertise on Zillow. They probably have clients falling into their lap every day, most of whom won’t pan into actual sales. As such, we felt we didn’t get enough attention or help especially as first time home ignorant buyers. Sure our realtor showed us the houses we were interested in, but he didn’t make recommendations on homes we might be interested in or even provided us comps when we decided on the house we wanted to make an offer on. I’m not sure if realtors even do this or if HGTV has skewed my expectations of a realtor. When we do this again however, we’ll definitely do a lot more research into the realtor we decide to use.
Anyway, we were an easy sale. We made an offer on the 2nd house we saw. I wanted to go in lower, Kristen wanted to go in higher, our realtor wanted to go in at a price that would seal the deal faster I assume. We went in somewhere in the middle and after a couple of counters, we settled on a price I could live with. Home inspection scheduling was a doozy because the sellers were getting married and going on their honeymoon! Weird timing to sell a house but we were nice about it and pushed the inspection back and gave the sellers over 2 weeks to get back to us on our requests. We also pushed closing back a week even though that’s really going to make moving really tight (and probably more expensive) for us. If there’s something I learned from all this, its that you should (1) take time to find a good realtor, no seriously ask around – friends, family, strangers! (2) be nice to your sellers but don’t be doormats and (3) inspect the house with your home inspector! Gosh I can’t tell you how much I learned during those 4 hours with our lovely home inspector (Shout out to White’s Home Inspection!) and how much we were able to negotiate because we knew what we were talking about!
Well its about a month before we officially close and get the house so fingers crossed it all goes well! The photo is a picture of the house from good ol’ Google Maps!
Maya at Home 