real estate adventures

After our trip to Berea on Memorial Day weekend, James and I put in an offer on a 5-acre property with a lot of UP! last Thursday. It had much to recommend it-a creek, nice neighbors, and an existing septic system, water, electric and cable were on the property, and it had a southern exposure on an east-facing slope. The previous house burned down about four-five years ago, and there was a pile of rubble/ash that needed to be cleared.
It has a creek down by the street, and goes UP (and UP some more!) from there. We'd have clearing work to do-rubble, trash left in the shed, brush that's grown up during the unattended years, etc. Fauna in the area includes a variety of song birds, deer, some bobcats, a bear that wandered through a couple of years ago, and rattlesnakes that come down to the creek in the dry season. James figured we'd just build them a pond further up the hill.

The neighbors told us there are wet-weather springs, so we'd have to figure out where those were before siting the house, but we could manage that.

We'd need to clear a good bit of underbrush, but that's free mulch. There were a couple of dying pines, and a poplar closer to the house site than we'd like, so those would come down and be cut for firewood. A few other trees would need to be cut to open a clear solar window, and we'd try to use those in our actual construction.

We could make it work!

It had been on the market for about 10 months, so we knew it was a bit over-priced, besides not showing well, so we offered just over tax assessment for it, but included contingencies that the septic system pass approval to get a building permit, and the owner obtain an easement for the driveway that the last survey (1995) showed as encroaching on the neighbor's property. We'd already talked to the neighbors and knew they didn't think it did, but we wanted to avoid problems in the future.

We submitted the offer Thursday morning, with a 5 PM Friday deadline for response. Late Friday our agent called to request an extension because the owner's agent had found out that he was out of town for the weekend. Could they have until Monday morning?

There was no response on Monday, so when I called my agent at 7 PM I gave the owner until 10 AM Tuesday to actually get in contact with me or we pulled the offer. About 9:30 AM I got a call from a gal in Berea who understands the permaculture/eco-friendly (eco-freak) scene, and she had some questions about the street possibly becoming a corridor, or paralleling the corridor for the future continuation of the bypass under construction to the north. (One more concern about that property.) Timmie also said she just bought almost two acres with a tear-down house four miles closer to town, so appropriate property is available. She's going to keep her ears open for us.

Discussing this with James, we had gotten to the point that we weren't going to do anything further to pursue the original property. So, of course, when we got home from our family trip to the library I had a message waiting from our agent.

The seller's agent had finally gone out to his house. He hadn't checked his messages and didn't know he had an offer! He accepted the price as long as we dropped the driveway easement contingency. If we hadn't already gotten to the point that we weren't going to renew the offer, we would probably have negotiated from there to increase the price of the property to cover the cost of a survey and filing paperwork at the courthouse, but we were past that.

Not wanting to buy a property that might lose use of the driveway should the neighbors decide to sell, and being too far from the site to deal with things ourselves, we're letting this offer go.

I'm back to shopping!