I just finished reading The Broke Professionals’ post about their treacherous home buying process - check out their post here to get some valuable lessons about shopping for houses and whole buying process. I probably need to read a hundred more articles about other home buyers’ experiences - there’s so much that can go wrong!

I certainly agree with their lesson about not falling in house-love too soon! I definitely had visions of myself living in this house, the beautiful flowers I would plant in the front yard, and the organic vegetable garden I would have! (I don’t even like vegetables!) But on the other hand - am I willing to shell out the money for a house I’m not in house-love with?

In my own house hunt, I am still interested in buying the house that I mentioned in my last post. When I last mentioned the house, it was to lament that I couldn’t afford it, thanks to some extremely high property taxes. Since then, I’ve worked out an arrangement with my parents to put 20% down in exchange for 20% of the profit from future sales. This saves me hugely, because I can avoid paying PMI, which would have been about $100 of the monthly payment.

The problem now is that the seller won’t sell! Our negotiation process has been extremely slow because the seller took at least 3 days to reply to any offer. Finally, on Sunday we offered a price that they had initially said that they would accept. And we haven’t heard a peep out of them.

They have also increased the list price of the house by $10,000, which seems crazy in Atlanta’s struggling housing market, but I guess they have decided that they can get higher offers that way.

Their new list price is pretty much my absolute maximum, but they won’t take the time to even get in touch with me and say “we’ve had enough offers that we think we should be listing this house for more - here’s our new price point” and let us negotiate from there. Instead, silence.

It’s tough to sit there and offer someone $135,000 and have them snub you like they couldn’t be bothered. That’s certainly not what I would expect a seller’s reaction to be!

So the search goes on, and it’s back to driving around on the weekend, checking out the other fish in the sea. Hopefully the next fish I find will be bank-owned, with a bit more felxibility in the price!