More Bad News

It's official. My real estate agent called me yesterday. The sellers of my dream home had finally called her back, and they've decided to take the house off the market - they're not moving out of state after all, and they're not selling it.

I'm pretty disappointed. But ironically, I'm more upset about 2 other things than just simply the loss of that house. One is that, had I acted on this back in October when we first looked at the place, rather than waffling around about it for two months, it would probably have already been a done deal before tragedy struck and they changed their mind. The second thing is I'm far more disappointed about not getting to move out of this house, than about not getting the new house. Semantics, maybe, but it's a point to me. I was so looking forward to being able to move out of this house and not have to deal with this clutter and too-small spaces anymore. For the last month I hadn't even been worried about this place, because I figured in a month it wasn't going to be my problem anymore.

Now it's my problem again, all the clutter and junk is still here, and now I have to figure out something to do with it.

Our agent is going to start looking for new houses for us to look at. But I've been scouring the online listings, and I've found precious little in our price range that fits our requirements. The nicer houses are all on little city lots like mine (I don't think I can stand moving to a new house and only having a tiny city lot where the neighbors are mere feet away); the houses on a little land (an acre or more) are mostly crappy, run-down, missing vital components we need (like 4 bedrooms, or a family room, or a fireplace).

The other concern is selling my house - I had a cash buyer for my house, but he was kind of in a hurry to buy something. If it takes us months to find a new house, I do not know if he's going to be willing to wait, and still buy this one. He may decide he has to go find something else. If he does, then I'm faced with selling this place on the market, which is very daunting. The market for sellers is tanking badly. The economy is tanking badly, and real estate analysts are predicting that selling homes is going to get even more difficult in 2009, because people who are in an economic crisis, maybe facing the potential loss of their jobs, aren't much in the mood to sink money into a new home. Unfortunately for me, my house being relatively cheap doesn't help me in this regard. The people who are more likely to be financially stable and fairly confident in their job security are people who have 'good' jobs and make more money; and they aren't going to want a house like mine.

The people who would be more likely to be looking at a house like mine - younger people maybe buying their first home - are going to be in less secure, lower-paying jobs, with more fear that they may lose said job, and be less inclined to go into mortgage debt. Ergo, selling my house could be much harder even than the 'average' house in this market.

Or so says Rayne the Real Estate guru. Well, it goes along with what I read online, anyway, and it makes sense to me.

Well. It is what it is, and I'll have to deal with it from this point, as it's the only place I have to deal with it from. I'm hoping to get up the energy this weekend to go back to work on my upstairs, which had become the storage dump in the last month. I need to start organizing it and trying to make it liveable again, since there's no telling how long I'll have to keep living with it.