Beginning the house hunting process

[shipo]

shipo - WOW Congratulations and good luck with the house hunt! If you do make a trip - Englewood CO and nearby areas are really nice; Littleton and Centennial especially - just my personal, unjaded opinion. If you do go, make sure you hydrate a lot beforehand. I had headaches and felt sleepy for months until my body adjusted to the mile high altitude: learned to make drinking water often, a habit.

Thanks! We're house hunting in Gaithersburg, MD where our daughter and her fiancé relocated to last summer, so at this point it is starting to look like I'll never make it to our Englewood office, especially because Google has reached out to me a couple times since December to get me to apply for a job with them.

[Zombie13]

Thanks! We're house hunting in Gaithersburg, MD where our daughter and her fiancé relocated to last summer, so at this point it is starting to look like I'll never make it to our Englewood office, especially because Google has reached out to me a couple times since December to get me to apply for a job with them.

Excellent! And good luck with the Google interviews!

[shipo]

Started the prequalification process today...

Here's an interesting spin on getting a mortgage compared to my last update; we just found out a close family member passed the Mortgage Loan Officer exam last year and is now working with a mortgage company, so we're giving him the first swing of the bat at getting us a mortgage.

Today we filled out the necessary information online to begin the prequalification process and came away with a few observations:

• Our last mortgage application was over 20 years ago; my how things have changed. I know, shocking; right?
• Note to self, having assets spread around across well over a dozen different accounts is a pain in the hind parts when applying for a mortgage; it may be time to consolidate a little.
• I fortunately anticipated virtually all of the information we needed for the application, so the process was more or less cut and paste; even still it took the better part of a half hour.
• It has been over a decade since we sold our last house, but even still, it felt kind of funny answering "No" to the "Are you a first time home buyer?" question. That said, things have changed so much I do feel like a newb when it comes to the home buying process.
• I quickly looked at what potential benefits we can glean from being a "First Time Homebuyer" in Montgomery County, Maryland; I'll need to focus on that this weekend because the brief look-see presented me with more information than I had time to wrap my brain around.

I'll keep y'all posted on the progress.

[shipo]

Update...

After six months of (initially) passive and then active searching for a new home, yesterday not one, but two new listings popped up, both of which tick off enough boxes for us to put in an offer. I had my MLO pull the trigger today for the prequalification and within a few hours we were preapproved and ready to go. I honestly expect to need to get into a bidding war for the one we like the most; fortunately we're preapproved for quite a bit more than what would be a very high agreed upon price.

If all goes well we'll close on the condo early May, have contractors in there to repaint the entire place and to rip out the carpeting and VPL (Vinyl Plank Flooring) which I detest, and lay down wood flooring throughout the main living areas. With any luck, we could be moved in by the end of May.

[justbroke]

Congratulations shipo. Did you say you were moving to the Maryland area?

[shipo]

Into the Kentlands community of Gaithersburg.

[justbroke]

Very cool. I spent a long time in and around Columbia (Howard County). I didn't live there, but I worked in the area for over 10 years. I have never been that far west into Maryland.

[shipo]

Very cool. I spent a long time in and around Columbia (Howard County). I didn't live there, but I worked in the area for over 10 years. I have never been that far west into Maryland.

LOL, "that far west into Maryland", Kentland is only 21 miles northwest of the center of Washington DC.

[justbroke]

Like I said... I didn't get out much. LOL. I think I stayed in the Inner Harbor once. I went into DC once via Union Station. I'm not too adventurous.

[shipo]

My wife and I were both Gypsys before we met; we'd lived in a combined nine states and fourteen metro areas by that time, and in the 30 years since then we've only lived in three states and four metro areas.

[shipo]

Oh geez, it has been quite the roller-coaster ride around here over the last few hours; I made an offer late this afternoon which featured automatic escalations of $5,000 over the next highest bid, with a cap at $75,000 over ask; the winning bid was going to be announced at 7:00 this evening. At seven our real estate agent called us and said there were so many offers they had to push the final decision back two hours. At 8:45 she called and said, "Well, you were the second highest bidder, however, you were out-bid by a whopping $65,000." I said, "Not going there, let them have it." She agreed.

A little after nine she called again and said, "You're nimble enough to close in three weeks, the high bidder wants to close in July; the seller has agreed to sell it to you if you bump up your offer another $10,000 and provide $40,000 in earnest money tomorrow. It hurt a bit, but I agreed; two hours later and lots of e-mail traffic back and forth, the contract is signed and our closing date is 10-May.

Funny thing, because of the rules on what constitutes a "First Time Home Buyer", it looks like I'm about to become one for the fourth time in my life.