What does all this mean? It means it's time to sell the house. And we're doing it all ourselves - sans real estate agent. So my work over the past two weeks has been organising all the advertising, signs, paperwork etc needed for the sale. The photos have been the most time consuming part, but they have turned out pretty awesome, even if I do say so myself. We're using the N.Z. equivalent of Ebay to list our property, which has it's own real estate section and gets the most traffic of any website in N.Z. We listed our house on Monday 7th June at 3pm and had two showings the following day.
The first one was all 'oh, there's only the two bedrooms?" and "was that the price listed on the website (in manner suggesting we were out of our scones)?' and I said "ah, yeah, it does say it's a 2 bedroom house on the internet you twat, and of course that is the price, and it's very fucking reasonable for where you are looking, you sour-faced cow'. Actually, what I really said was, 'yes, just the two' and 'yes, that's what it is listed as", while trying to sound confident and self-assured. So once she departed without taking any info and obviously not keen to buy, I did feel a bit deflated. Perhaps we had got our figure wrong, even though we'd done our market research thoroughly and even paid (handsomely I might add) for a bona fide market appraisal.
The second viewing was a young couple, very similar in age to me and B, who basically walked in the door and fell in love with the place, wanted to know if we were accepting offers straight away before holding the open home on the Sunday. I said that for the right offer, we would consider cancelling the open home. So, they put together an offer and we received it on the Thursday morning. B and I had a good think about it all, went back with a counter offer and ended up signing the agreement on Friday evening. Only downside is it is conditional, so we have to wait for those conditions to be met. On the upside they are standard conditions and very hard to back out of unless their finance doesn't come through, which is not likely as they are both professionals. We are still having the open home today, though we'll be advising people it's under offer and that they are welcome to put in a back up offer. That way we'll hopefully not have wasted all our money on advertising and have a list of interested people to contact about the house if it all goes to custard.
All I can say is fuck that was fast though! Once it's unconditional, they will give us their deposit and we'll be busy planning our exit from Wellington and be gone in around 5 weeks. Just like that. Jeebus I hope it goes through without any shennanigans, because I do not want to have to go through the negotiation process again.
It has been a bit stressful and will continue to be for me (natural born worrier, not to be mistaken with warrior - I am decidedly a big sook) until that agreement is fully binding with no conditions and their deposit in our bank. One good thing is that I can't really do anything about the relocation stuff until the contract goes through, as I won't be able to organise the removal company or book flights until I have confirmed dates. I genuinely have nothing to do, other than read, knit (yes, yes, I am a Nana) and to work out how we're going to spend save our money.
Sunshine here we come!
