10 houses. We finally won a bidding war on our tenth house. It took over a year. We began searching for a house in late 2016. We were living the good BC life (before children) in a high-rise condo. But after baby number 1, then baby number 2 came along, condo living was no longer very glamorous. We dipped our toes into the housing market in late 2016 and things were really red hot by 2017. If you don't live in Seattle or weren't searching for a home at this time, its hard to articulate the madness.
A house would go on the market, post an offer review date, have people crawling all over it during open houses, get multiple pre-inspections and have multiple offers with escalation clauses bidding up the price. The most competitive offers were frequently all cash and many waived all contingencies: inspection, appraisal and financing. Escalation clauses increased offers by $5,000 to $10,000 over the next best offer and were typically 5, 10 or even 20% over asking. Properties were easily selling for $50,000 to $100,000 or more over asking when they had already been listed at or above market value. A shortage of single-family housing drew prices higher like this month after month.
It was absolute insanity. People would roll-in from out of state where $1M homes were a good deal and walk in with cash. It was really hard to compete with that. You had to basically make a split-second decision about whether to put in an offer or not after a single quick visit. We started to get creative. We even made an unsolicited offer on a home we believed would be coming on the market soon. Not long before that I had teased my brother for buying an old car sight unseen for $600. Who would do such a thing? It seemed completely absurd to me that someone would buy a car sigh unseen. No shit, we offered to buy a house we have never been inside. That is bonkers. We started looking for fixer-uppers. Not just little projects, but homes needing a new roof, electrical, plumbing, and windows before you get to anything remotely cosmetic. If they were massively falling apart or smelled of pee soaked carpet, we were there, parading our little family through open houses weekend after weekend.
Finally August rolled around. The competition was either vacationing or too fatigued to notice a two bedroom WWII era brick bungalow on a great corner lot hit the market. It need everything. It had charm but was built with no-frills. You could tell from satellite imagery that it needed a new roof. But it was close to the village, a school and a block from a park. We submitted our offer. I was used to loosing so was surprise when our offers as accepted. We were finally home. And then the real work began.
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