I feel confident at this time to post an update on my pending closing - a large 3300 sq ft ranch. This has been so stressful and an absolute roller coaster ride. We took a deposit at 12 weeks after two price drops (10% total). The market has been so slow and we just didn't have the activity we though we should have. We insisted on both drops and before the second one we really felt that if we wanted something to happen, we just had to drop it below our competition. Saw just too many houses make litte drops and be on forever. I also saw too many houses that sold recently just were given away after a while - was very upsetting!!!

The people that are buying the home came in at the first price drop and loved it, but didn't make an offer until the next one. Negotiated just below listing but gave up my expensive fairly new front load washer :( Everything went well until..........the furnace! While it's 30 years old and works fine they weren't happy about it's age and they demanded a new one or the deal was off. After what felt like a week of back and forth, we conceeded and are giving them $$$$ for a new one.

We put a deposit to hold a new home but kept extending because there was no way we were going to sign contracts until things were solid at our end. The new home contract was iron clad as written and once we would sign and give them our 10%, we would be locked in and would lose everything if we backed out! Our current home is the forth in line in what would be a domino effect and there were just too many buyers that needed to sign contracts and get mortgage approval - unbelievable stress!!!

The home we are purchasing is a spec in a new 55+ neighborhood where all the buyers are building custom and spending a fortune. This has everything that we want and we negotiated for $100,000 under what people are building up there. There was just no way we were going to lose this and to our surpise (which with this market it shouldn't have surprised us) the company ended up meeting our demands and rewrote our contract so if our buyers backed out, we would walk away and not lose our deposit. This was something the builders said they would never do when we asked several times before, but we stood our ground and they conceeded! Plus we negotated a few other things in the home that we wanted and paid a small upcharge to have a double convection oven added along with the cabinet change required. Because of our great negotiating (it works both ways!!) as upsetting as it was to sell our home for less than it should have gone for in a better market, it worked out in our favor at the other end. It also wasn't comforting to see the large home accross from us selling for a song (they moved out, had a pipe burst and ended up wih mold issues) and another vacant home a block away also sold for so much less. So we really ended up doing fine. In the big picture, after a bunch of years go buy, the dollars we gave up really won't matter.

Looking back, if we realized the furnace would have caused us such a headache, we would have replaced it before we put the house on the market and not dropped as much the second price reduction. But even though we sold the home for slightly less than we bought it for 6 years ago, we really can't complain. I still shudder when I think of a few other homes very similar to ours in our area that sold a few months after we bought ours for $200,000 more than we paid for ours!!! I would have died if we were in that situation now. It did kill me though when a few weeks ago a beautiful mid century killer ranch in our area that I absolutley loved came on the market. It was quite a bit smaller than ours and on a main two lane road. Their agent used ours as a comp and they listed for $35K less than us. It sold in three days!!!!! I'm dying!!!!!! Oh, well!

Our market is still terrible, houses are still not selling unless they are different or being given away, and what is now coming on so much lower than what has been listed 4 - months ago. I have several friends that have their homes on the market, have dropped thier price and still are not getting people in the door. It is very discouraging to say the least.

We are "set" to close in two weeks and are busy packing, etc. Looking forward to our new life in our new digs!!