From here I think the next hurdle is the appraisal. Our bank has to send out an appraiser to be sure the house is valued atleast at what we offered. If not then the whole deal could go down the drain, but I am feeling confident :). We still don’t have a firm close date, and from what I understand it could be anywhere from July 29th to August 7th, so that doesn’ really help too much when planning a move. But I am slowly starting to the house in order, I am thinking 2 weeks before the close date will give us plenty of time to pack up. Let’s hope so anyway

The post The process continues appeared first on Orlando First Time Home Buyer Guide.

Now we are just waiting on the seller (the bank) to sign back on the contract so we can get the ball rolling on our mortgage. In the meantime, I have been running around like mad, gathering documents, scanning, emailing and calling people. I heard someone say before that buying a house is like a full time job, and I have to say I sort of agree! Between all of the necessary stuff (finding insurance, preparing documents..actually looking at the homes) and the not so necessary stuff (spending hours thinking about what color paint to use in the kitchen) it really takes all of your time.

Well, the sooner the bank signs this contract back, the sooner we can move into this house, so I am just keeping my fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly from here on out and the bank will hurry up and sign this thing!

The post The Home Inspection appeared first on Orlando First Time Home Buyer Guide.

The other problem has been trying to solidify home owners insurance. In case no one told you, insurance is pretty hard to come by in Florida these days and insurance on a historic home is nearly impossible. After speaking with roughly 45 insurance agencies I received several quotes for insurance. But before I could breath a sigh of relief I would need to schedule a 4 point inspection to guarantee the quote would hold up. This took place over the course of a few days and before we knew it, our 5 days had expired (really 3 days!) without completing the home inspection. But honestly, why would I pay almost $500 for a home inspection on a home I can not insure?

So now we are waiting again. Our Realtor has communicated to the seller’s our dilemma but it seems to no avail. It also seems that during our 5 days of verbal agreement, they were accepting back up offers. The seller’s agent informed us that she has several new offers to show to the bank,  so we will just have to wait and see if they will extend our agreement.

This whole process is SO frustrating!

The post Offer Accepted! appeared first on Orlando First Time Home Buyer Guide.

In the mean time we went and looked at another house for sale in the Deer Run area of Casselberry. The neighborhood was much cuter than I had expected and so was the house. After struggling with the lock on the door for almost 20min we finally got inside, no surprise it needs work, another bank owned home that was trashed by the last owners. But it is not terrible and just a good cleaning and a coat of paint would do wonders (new flooring and cabinets wouldn’t hurt either) We added it to our list of fall backs if our Downtown Sanford choice falls though.

In the mean time we will keep waiting.

The post The waiting game appeared first on Orlando First Time Home Buyer Guide.

I have to admit the offer was very low considering the asking price, but you would think that the bank would at least want to entertain an offer. Apparently not Bank of America. So we had two choices, walk away from it or submit a new offer. Since our first offer was very low we decided to submit a new one and added 25k to try and make them at least look at it this time.  So back to the drawing board, I had to get an updated good faith estimate and an updated pre-approval letter from our bank to include with our new offer. And just to add to the misery, interest rates are going up! How is that possible?? Shouldn’t that be regulated or something?? lol

Now we are back in the waiting game. We are still casually looking at other homes, but this one is by far our favorite.  Even if it does need some work, it is in better condition than any we have seen so far and we really like the floor plan. Wait and see, wait and see and hopefully the interest rates will STOP going up!

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The post Bad News appeared first on Orlando First Time Home Buyer Guide.

So that left the one in Altamonte and the other Sanford home. We thought about it for a day or so and despite the better location of the altamonte home, decided we would be happier living in the historic house. We called Jose and told him we would like to make an offer and met him and Claudia that night to write it up.

Who knew putting an offer on a house could be so painful?! Because this house is banked owned the usual process has been turned upside down. The bank had pages of required documents from our lender that must be submitted with the offer. At least we are already pre-approved so getting all of those documents together just took one phone call to our mortgage guy.  But instead of being able to submit the offer that night, we were not able to submit it for a day and half.

So finally our first ever offer was submitted! Now we just have to wait to hear back from the bank. This can apparently take a minimum of 7 days or longer if the offer was less than full asking price. (ours was) So now we just sit and wait. Ugh!

The post Our First Offer appeared first on Orlando First Time Home Buyer Guide.

We still found about 10 good options throughout Seminole County and set out to look at each one.

The first house we saw was a terribly run down (but beautiful!) 2 story historic home in Sanford. Both, my husband and I, felt that this house could be SO wonderful once restored! Seeing that one first  definitely started the search out on the right foot! I have always loved historic homes, new homes just can’t compete with the old wood floors, crown molding and character of an old home.

The next house we saw was also a historic home. It was not in as good a location as the first, but the interior already had been completely re-done and it was beautiful, with a great floor plan. The outside however needs some love and was a little overgrown.

We looked at two other houses that were more contemporary “Florida” homes.  Block with stucco, traditional floor plans, traditional neighborhoods. A little boring. And even they need work. The carpet was torn out in one of them, exposing the stained concrete, the closet doors were broken and the smell was offensive in both of them. I guess that’s what happens when a home is vacant for too long.

Most of the homes we are looking at are bank owned. Which means we could get a great deal on the price, but not with out some compromise. All of the homes need a  work. Some more than others. I guess it is pretty common for the owner to destroy the house before the bank takes it. Probably even more common in our price range, lol.

We still have a few more houses to look at and Jose and Claudia set up an alert, so we will be emailed when new properties come on the market. We want to keep an open mind, but my husband and I just can’t stop thinking about the two historic homes in Sanford.

The post The Hunt for our First Home In Orlando appeared first on Orlando First Time Home Buyer Guide.

After talking with our Realtors (Jose and Claudia) we decided that the best way to tackle this new venture was to first get pre-approved for a home loan. That process alone ended up taking so much longer than we had anticipated.  The whole time  I was sitting on pins waiting to find out if in this new “credit crunched” economy we would get approved. Dare I even look at what might be available? Of course I did and also started watching HGTV around the clock. I am a little obsessed. It has taken an excruciating 2 weeks to finally get the pre-approval letter (yay!), But it is also a much lower price point than we had been thinking. (Boo)

But being optimists we have set up our first appointment to meet with  Jose and Claudia to look at house, and see what we could possibly find in this seemingly depressing price range.

I will definitely post updates a long the way to let you know where this new experience will take us and what we are able to find.

The post Buying our First Home: Getting Started appeared first on Orlando First Time Home Buyer Guide.