Recapping the Wildest Week of my Illustrious Career in Real Estate

I’ve given myself the task to write 50 blogs this year. I’m not that great at math but that’s roughly one per week. So I figured, what better way to start it off than by recapping an absolute rollercoaster of a week for AP Real Estate? Let me set the stage.

It is Christmas Eve. At this point, our house has been on the market a little over one month, and we have already had one offer fall through. Team morale is low, but tomorrow our homeboy Jesus is celebrating a birthday, so we’re not letting it get us down. I’m sitting at Brendan’s when he receives a call from our agent. I immediately think it’s an offer and I’m right (per usual). I can’t think of a better Christmas gift. It’s as if God himself called up his boy Santa and said, “Yo! Get these homies an offer!” And Santa delivered. It’s not a great offer, but it’s fair. So we counter slightly below asking price and make ourselves a celebratory drink (as one does after receiving an offer).

Now, the thing about rollercoasters is that they are filled with ups and downs… highs and lows… unexpected twists and turns… “What goes up, must come down” said Abraham Lincoln after he discovered gravity. And right now our spirits are up. Fast forward to the day after Christmas. We are still in negotiation with the prospective buyers, but we are close. I’m sitting at home waiting for some family to arrive for dinner, when I get a call from Brendan. He proceeds to tell me that our agent received a call from one of our neighbors informing him that our FRONT DOOR IS WIDE OPEN! Brendan is in a panic and rightfully so, considering neither of us had been to the house in over three days. We immediately head down to the house to assess the situation. At this point, we are thinking one of two things. Either someone broke into the house (worst case scenario) or the front door was not properly closed by the last buyer’s agent that showed the place. We get to the house and quickly realize that nothing was stolen. We rule out the possibility that the house was broken into, thankfully. That being said, we had received six inches of snow over the past few days with temperatures below freezing. Pipes are completely frozen and we have no running water.

The remainder of the day is spent with the furnace blasting and all the valves in the house open, hoping to thaw out the pipes and get some kind of water flow. We are both stressed, frustrated and wondering why this is happening to us. The next couple days are no better. We continue to keep the house as warm as possible while running a space heater all day in the crawl space. Oh, by the way, that offer we were negotiating… the buyers backed out when we were $1500 APART! $1500!?!?!? That’s peanuts over a 30-year mortgage. Whatever, we didn’t want you to buy our house anyway. So as high as we were Christmas Eve, we are equally as low shortly after Christmas. We went from having an offer and thinking we were done spending money to having frozen pipes, no water and no offers. Bad couple days for the AP boys.

But wait… there’s more! After further investigation (which involved me going into the crawl space), we discover that the main water line feeding our meter completely split in half due to the freezing! We immediately call the city to have the water turned off at the street in order for us to hire a plumber to remedy the situation. So, long story short, we went back and forth between visits from three separate plumbers and the city water department. We spent around $1000 to fix the main line along with some other breaks in the plumbing system and the issue was resolved.

I forgot to mention one thing. During this whole frozen pipes fiasco, we received another offer which we were about ready to accept. It was about $8,000 below asking, but we didn’t care at this point. We were so ready to be done with this house. Since the water had not been working, though, we were delaying accepting the offer as long as possible so that we could get the water running for the buyer’s inspection.

It is now December 28th, and we are ready to accept the offer at the end of the day. Low and behold, our agent calls us and says he got a call that day with a FULL PRICE OFFER!!! We are ecstatic. Literally jumping for joy like a couple of buffoons. Water is back on at the house and we have accepted a full price offer, literally hours before we accepted one for much less.

If there is anything I’ve learned from this week, it’s that the life of a real estate investor is a wild and crazy one. I can’t even fathom how things will be years from now when instead of thousands of dollars we are dealing with millions. Either way, the AP boys will find a way to get it done. That I’m sure of.