So after almost a month of radio silence it's time to announce the big news. After a challenging and arduous two-month real estate journey, we finally closed on a house! Of all places, we found this home on facebook (which is not where anyone really sells houses) but we stumbled upon it anyway and since no one else checks facebook there wasn't a lot of competition for this home in an otherwise incredibly competitive market for fixer uppers.
Finding the home through a non-traditional source also made negotiations a lot easier since we could talk to Victor directly instead of having to run through realtors each time and it allowed us to get a sense of what Victor cared about in terms of selling the house. It turned out that a big thing for him was he wanted to get up and go the day we closed and did not want to worry about getting rid of the endless piles of junk inside and outside the house. Since the name of the game for Tyler and me is sweat equity, this worked out perfectly. We were happy to buy the home as-is in exchange for a good deal. A week or two of cleanup probably saved us a good 5k-10k. Plus picking through someone else's old stuff is like thrift store heaven for me (maybe not Tyler).
What's more is that since we didn't use any realtors on either side for the purchase which saved us around 6% in commission. This is something we are really proud of. There were a few days where we were head deep in real estate legalese but it turns out that with the proper research and a few phone calls with friends/family in the biz, we really didn't need to pay anyone for anything beyond a title company to transfer the money when we closed and an inspector to make sure the house wasn't secretly filled with poisonous lava.
So now we are proud owners of a home in a cute little town called Gentry, Arkansas for around 85k. We are hoping to sell the house renovated for somewhere around 135k-145k. We are estimating around 20k in renovation costs. And a timeline of around 3-4 months. Seeing as we are new to all of this, all of these numbers could be way off so we'll keep you updated as we go.
The address is 301 Parks Cir, Gentry, AR, 72734 and let this blog post serve as an official invitation to anyone who wants to spend a few days or weeks in Arkansas. As long as you trade a little manual labor we have two extra bedrooms, a half acre in the backyard, a fire pit and fresh baked pies a three minute walk away. It's only a 27 hour drive from the west coast and 17ish hour drive from the east!
We bought the home from a man named Victor who is in his mid sixties and was looking to move up north to Indiana with his son. We certainly were not two peas of the same pod as his backyard had a confederate flag waving proudly and one of the first things he told us is that we sounded like yankees and northerners. With that said, we got along well enough to come to an agreement on the home.
Tyler and I added a few points to our "privilege scorecard" because even though Victor called us out for being "yankees", us being two whites kids probably only helped our chances at buying the home from a dude waving a confederate flag. (We have since taken down the flag).
So now begins the renovation journey. Step one will be to clear all of the junk out of the house. Can't wait to find what hidden treasures lie beneath the layers of dog fur, Mike's Hard Lemonade cans and giant vats of flammable liquid strewn about the property.
Stay tuned for our next post which will be a video walkthrough of the house!
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