the house hunt has begun

Our lender has all our paperwork for our financing/pre-approval and we've started looking at houses. We checked out a few houses in south Glendora last Saturday.

House 1: Small house on Mauna Loa, 3 bed, 1.5 bath. It is a fixer-upper though it has nice cherry wood flooring. We would have to redo the kitchen, so we don't think we could get FHA financing for it.

House 2: Small house around the corner from house #1. 3 bed, 1.5 bath plus a sun room. We liked this house and put in an offer, but our offer got rejected. We're kind of confused about what the selling agent was doing and our agent is looking into it, but we'll look elsewhere. Like the previous house, the rooms were very small (though the big one should fit our cal king) and it only has a 1 car garage. Maybe the seller will feel differently when his house sits on the market a while longer.

House 3: This house is slightly bigger than the other 2 (1,200 sq ft rather than 1,000) and is located near the Glendora marketplace. 3 bed, 1.75 bath. The backyard is a little weird (long, narrow, and all sloping down to a wash with only a chain link fence on the back side) and needs all the carpeting pulled. We're not too sure about other damages it looks likely to have. Resale can be a concern with this one due to the wash in the backyard and the freeway behind that.

So we put in an offer on house #2 on Monday. Tuesday the selling agent emailed our agent, Tommy, to ask if that was our best and highest offer. Tommy told us this is a tactic used for bank-owned houses, so we're not sure why they did that for a standard sale. So he told the selling agent that we are waiting for a response. Then at the end of the day on Wednesday they come back with just a straight-out rejection. No counter-offer. Not sure if the seller won't go below the listing price or what. We're willing to negotiate! Well, that house was just listed the beginning of January. He might feel differently in a few months. We don't have a deadline to move into a house and have plenty of time. A lot of the houses in the area are short sales and we're trying to avoid those for now, but we may end up going that way. 

Meanwhile, we're going to look at some more houses in the area to see what we can find!