The 45-Day Countdown: Day 29

We are at day 29 in our quest to reallocate the funds from the sale of our rental in California, in the 45 days allowed by tax law.  So far we’ve made offers on 6 houses, and have managed to close on one.

The first house we made an offer on was the one with the septic system installation disaster, so we made the reluctant decision to not buy that one.

The second house we made an offer on was a very pretty house in the best school district in all of Albuquerque, on Oso Abrazo. Unfortunately, we were outbid by someone who wanted it more than we did.

The third house we made an offer on is the cute townhome on Academy Ridge, with the beautiful (but impractical) backyard. We closed on that one Friday, so it’s now our first purchase!

The fourth house we made an offer on was a nice house in Rio Rancho. They’ve been on the market a long time and are asking too much, so I offered low. They countered but only came down a couple of thousand. I increased my offer significantly and told my agent that’s as high as I would go. They countered again, and as before, only came down a couple of thousand, and they also stipulated that they didn’t want to close until the end of July. I want to close by the end of June and have it rented by the end of July. So I turned down their second counter offer and did not counter again.

Here’s the house that I didn’t buy because we were never able to agree on a price and closing date:

The fifth house we made an offer on is a very small house, again in the best school district in Albuquerque. That’s the one that went pending before I knew I was the buyer! I don’t have a good photo of it. We’re going back out there tomorrow (John hasn’t seen it yet). So I’ll take a better photo tomorrow.

So yes, you may be asking, “What? John hasn’t seen it yet?” And it’s true. I’m looking at houses without him. He simply doesn’t have the time. The first time he ever saw the Academy Ridge house, that we just closed on Friday, was during the inspections. For some reason, he trusts me to buy rentals, yet I cannot pick out tile without his sign-off. Of course if something unexpectedly bad comes up during inspections, we can get out of the contract. (Or if they destroy the entire property trying to install a new septic.)

Here’s the sixth house we’ve made an offer on. We are also under contract on this house, as of yesterday. John will also see this one for the first time tomorrow. This one is in Rio Rancho near Intel. John is a little worried that Intel will pull out of Rio Rancho, and the market will go down. But we offered on this house because it was a very good price.

There is one potential issue with a storage area that is attached to the house and extends to the side wall – creating a “zero lot line” situation. That may be violating zoning code, but we were told it’s been like that since before the current owners bought it, so maybe it doesn’t matter?

Zero lot line means there is zero feet between the house and the property line. Some houses are built like that (with city planning department approval). But the little shed-addition on the side of this house was obviously an after thought. I’ll add better pictures tomorrow. I had a migraine when I saw this house Friday and didn’t take good photos. And of course the listing photos don’t include the funny addition.

But in general this house is quite nice inside, and has an easy-care backyard with no neighbors looking into it (that’s my pet peeve; neighboring windows looking down into the backyard). This one doesn’t have an arroyo though!

You can almost see the funny storage addition; the white door on the left side of the house. There’s no indoor access to that storage area. There were no keys to get into it, so we stipulated that we would need access to the storage area during inspections.

From google earth, it sort of looks like the locked storage area might have skylights. See the two little white dots on the lower left next to the neighbor’s tree? Those look the same as the skylights elsewhere.

Hmmmm. Now why would people install skylights in their potentially illegal, locked shed/storage addition? I have one theory…