Luckily, this wasn’t a typical sale, and my buyer wasn’t typical, either. It had taken literally a year for us to get to this point, and by now she knew exactly what she was getting into. She was completely unfazed by the pieces of plaster on the dining room floor, the exposed wooden slats in the ceiling above. And hey, at least the ceiling collapse hadn’t exposed any mold. Or bugs of the alive or dead variety. Or a body.
I’d met Meredith (not her real name) over a year ago. In response to a query on NextDoor asking for Realtor recommendations, I’d posted a list of questions and answers that home sellers could use to determine whether a Realtor was a good fit for them. Meredith had sent me a direct message, looking for someone who’d help her buy a place. She’d worked with a Realtor before, but it wasn’t a good fit.
Fresh out of her residency, Meredith had been approved for a physician’s loan (a program that ignores the standard debt-to-income ratio when med school loans are part of that debt) and was eager to buy a place that needed some work she could do herself. After our company sales meeting one Tuesday, I met her out in South Pasadena. The house was a time-capsule from the 1950s; even worse, its backyard neighbor was a three-story McMansion that put the entire backyard in shadow. I gave her my little speech I call “The things you can change versus the things you can’t change.” She realized the house wasn’t the right property for her, and I think I earned some trust with my feedback.
I continued to show her a variety of properties. Some days she wanted to look at small apartment buildings way out of her price range; other days tiny older homes in Kenwood. She brought her dog along; I told her about the great new guy I’d met a few weeks ago. “He asked me to go to London with him,” I said. “Is it crazy that I think I’m going to go?”
“You should go for it,” she advised. “You only live once!”
Right before I headed off for London, Meredith found a house she liked, an overpriced 1920s cottage in old Northeast that had been on the market for months. Before writing up the offer, I put a call into her mortgage broker to confirm the details of her approval. A few hours later, Meredith called me back, fuming. Her approval had been rescinded. The broker had made a mistake, believing she was an employee rather than a contractor. As a 1099, she wouldn’t qualify for any type of loan.
“If I have to,” Meredith said, “I’m going to get another job so I can buy my #$%$$ house!”
I went to London and got engaged. Meredith went back to work. We kept in touch. She got a fulltime job at a hospital, keeping her contractor position for extra cash. The new job put her at a much higher price point.
She found another house, a pink Spanish style with a separate garage and pool in the Jungle Prada neighborhood. The listing said that due to roof leaks and dated wiring, the house was uninsurable and the sellers would only accept cash. But it was a beautiful house and Meredith was in love. I knew there was no such thing as uninsurable, so I called the insurance broker I work with to start getting quotes. My thinking was if I put together an offer that had insurance as part of the package, the sellers might drop their “cash only” demand.
In the meantime, a second house—a nearly identical property just down the street--went on the market for nearly the same price, and its listing said that conventional loans would be accepted. Meredith and I took that to mean that the house wouldn’t need the new roofing and electrical systems that made the first house uninsurable. The new place wasn’t as pretty on the inside – older kitchen and baths, painted woodwork—but without the cost of a new roof and electrical system, Meredith could plow that money into prettying up the house. When the first house went under contract, the choice was out of our hands. Then, while Meredith was getting her mortgage pre-approval, the second one accepted an offer, too.
Meredith was heartbroken. I hit the MLS, trying to find a similar property somewhere in St. Pete. Her pre-approval came in; we put in a backup offer on that second house, just in case. Meredith worked day and night, saving up for her down payment. Weeks later, Jason, the listing agent on that second house, called. Their buyer might be backing out, and they liked our backup. The celebration from that phone call was all too brief—the house was now officially a short sale, and the bank had stepped in. The first deal was off, but now the property was off the market. Another heartbreak. I hit the MLS again.
A few weeks later, another call from Jason. The sellers had permission from the bank to sell, and could we increase our offer by a few thousand? Meredith was delighted to comply, and amazingly, we were now under contract with her dream property! A miracle!
Not. So. Fast.
“Yeah, I remember this place,” the pest inspector said as we met for the property inspection. “I was here in May, the last time it was under contract. Let me show you the termite damage.” Even worse: the property inspector found serious leaks in the roof, and cloth-wrapped wiring that would have to be replaced. I was pissed: the house had already been inspected, the listing agent should have known these things and didn’t tell us. But Meredith was undeterred and our insurance broker said the property could still be insured. The sellers extended our inspection period for two weeks so Meredith could get the work priced out and the plumbing line could be replaced. When the bids for the work went in the high five figure range, the sellers agreed to drop the price by 75K. We were back on track.
As Meredith continued to work with her lender—a busy woman who brushed off my phone calls with “Everything’s going great!”—we awaited the appraisal and approval from the bank that held the sellers’ mortgage.
“Do you have any idea why my house is listed for auction?” Meredith sent me the Zillow ad. Sure enough, her house was scheduled to go up for auction two weeks before our closing. My heart sank. Had the sellers’ bank rejected our offer, and no one had even bothered to tell us?
“Don’t worry,” Jason told me. “The owners are working with an attorney. We’re getting the auction canceled. We just need the appraisal to come in good.”
The appraisal was better than good. It was so much higher than our contracted price, I worried that the mortgage bank would reject the contract and demand more money. Jason assured me that wouldn’t happen. We were right on track and scheduled to close the day before Halloween. I packed my bags and went off to get married, thinking it was smooth sailing till this closing.
“Do you have a minute to talk?” Meredith called me two days after I’d gotten back from my wedding and one-day honeymoon. “Always,” I said, bracing myself for what was next.
What was next is that Meredith’s lender, Ms. “Everything’s going great/I don’t have time to talk to you,” had called the Friday before my wedding with the news that her loan had been rejected due to a mix-up over student loan forbearance. Luckily, she had gone back to another lender she’d spoken to a few months ago, and was on track for approval. Unfortunately, that meant the closing would be delayed by two weeks.
After I talked to the new lender, I called to give Jason the bad news. Considering he answered the phone with, “I was just about to call you; we are approved for October 30th!” it wasn’t a great conversation. He’d call the seller, but he warned me not to get my hopes up.
I was pleasantly surprised when he reported the seller would sign the extension. I was even more pleasantly surprised when he said the bank agreed to it as well, canceling the auction. But we still needed a new appraisal, insurance, and final approval from Meredith’s lender.
“Have you seen the weather reports?” Meredith asked.
It was two weeks before closing and something was brewing in the Gulf. I knew what that meant: We had to get her insurance bound before the insurance companies put a hold on writing new policies because of the hurricane. With the finish line finally in sight—and the new appraisal in (lower than the first one, but still good)—we rushed through paperwork, facilitated phone calls between the insurance company and the bank, and finally breathed free as the insurance was bound and the clear to close given just a handful of days before Tropical Storm Eta was scheduled to hit the Tampa area.
“I drove over to the house,” Meredith reported the Thursday after the storm. “There’s a tree down. I’ve already called the city to see if it’s on my property or if the city owns it.”
What more could go wrong? “Technically,” I reminded her, “it’s still their house and their tree. We could let them know and ask—” “No,” she said. “We’ve gotten this far. I am not doing anything to mess this up now!”
Which is why, when we walked in the day before closing and found a quarter of the dining room ceiling on the dining room floor, that Meredith would go through with the purchase anyway. (There was also a much smaller collapse in the living room.) She’d already signed a huge contract with a construction company covering the roofs, electrical work, and all drywall and plaster work that needed to be done to clean up. This collapse was covered.
But first, she was getting the place tented.
The next day, we went to closing, and I handed her her keys. Over a year had passed since we’d met; nearly everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, and she still wound up a homeowner. That’s the beauty and frustration of being a Realtor; every deal is different, and many problems that crop up during the process aren’t necessarily foreseeable or have obvious solutions. The beauty is when enough people—a determined buyer, a creative loan officer, an experienced insurance broker—come together to make one person’s dream come true. Even when that dream includes a ceiling on the floor.
Meredith's dream house, known in the neighborhood as "The Grande Dame."
