Innocently, happily, I wrote the offer. Carl and I were buying our next and I hope last house. We had been looking a little and he had fallen in love with an expanded farmhouse on a small acreage west of Vale Oregon. We had decided late last summer that we really needed to accept the reality that a. we weren't going to get the remodelling done on our place for it to sell as residential, and b. no one seemed to want it for commercial yet, so c. we ought to go ahead and move while we were still agile enough and rent out our property.
The house we were buying had some potential problems, so I decided to go with a 10% down conventional loan to minimize the hassles. MISTAKE!!! I wrote the offer for a 45 day close.... we just closed Friday. We had an 85 day close. As I have mentioned before I am glad I can't sue myself! Carl and I dare to have several properties, and several bank accounts and even worse .... sometimes we deal in cash. Now he has a normal job and we have very good credit scores but that didn;t make much difference. We didn't fit in the narrow template that the Fannie Mae gods have decreed so we had to go through layer after layer of idiocy, condition after condition and all one at a time.
In the midst of all this, we did sell our place, but we are carrying it and that sent the underwriters into even more hand-wringing.
If we hadn't had a cooperative seller we could easily have lost out on the house we wanted. My confidence in my abilities to write a contract that means anything has been rocked. Underwriting is so slow and so ludicrous today that it is nearly impossible to pick a closing date. For an example one of the things we had to do was explain that we were no longer operating businesses that we hadn't had in 10 for one and 20 for the other years. This kind of stupidity causes delay after delay and means nothing.
The hardest part is that there is no recourse! Other than complaining to every official I can find and on every blogging platform I can there is nothing we can do about this. Yet.
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