Qualifiers
This is not a real estate blog. In fact I find rather absurd the idea that slices of land, houses, and homes are things to be bought and sold the same as lampshades or chocolate croissants. But here and now they are (for some, anyways).
This is also not a roast of the previous owner of our house, although I will not hide all of our frustration or confusion. Just please remember that, by all accounts, the person referred to by the title of this article is (or at least was at the time of these events) a troubled person out of their depth and stuck in a number of difficult situations. Some of these situations seem even to have arisen from their own efforts to do the right thing™, but perhaps with a bit of naivete 1.
The Hesitant Seller
By the start of this story, my partner and I had been looking for a fixer-upper that we could afford for a little while. So far, we had found lots of houses we wither couldn't afford or wouldn't be able to live in while we did that "fix"-ing part. Or rather my partner Rebecca had been looking online at these property listings. I would have burned out from disappointment months prior if I had invested the energy scrolling and reading that she had. Just one difference between us that I cannot express my gratitude for enough (and I probably don't..) <3 Even from my comparatively distant vantage point, I had already managed to get attached to a property that didn't work out for us...
And then we she saw the price drop on a listing up in Piscataquis that had just enough space for all of our goals and seemed comparatively well cared-for. She told me about it with a practiced neutrality and only a hint of her mostly disguised annoyance at my response of confusion: "wait, which one is that one again - the yellow one, or the one with the long gravel driveway?" 2. My second question was: "OK, so what's the catch?"
For starters, the seller canceled both of the showings we scheduled. For one of them, our realtors were at the door and my mother was in the car, taking time off of work to help us, when the seller changed their mind with no explanation! Communication was a little challenging, to say the least. But, on the other hand, we believe now that the house would probably have sold (to someone other than us) if the seller hadn't been so unreliable at their side of the formal rituals involved in an American real-estate transaction.
We know now that this house had the reputation of being a "drug house" under the previous owner, and while that phrase carries a lot of different meanings to different people, this house certainly looked the part at the time. Start by picturing all of those little acts of neglect that make judgy suburban women shake their heads at a "sad" house/lot, and then add to your mental image a few uncontained burn pits and several piles of trash - half of it in bags, half scattered by the wind like tumbleweeds. From our realtors' language, we suspect they thought we would back out as soon as we got our first look at the place.
But we knew (mostly) what we were signing up for. We certainly at least had the know-how to use Google Earth and access public records. So, after a pattern of avoidance emerged, we put together our best guess at a timeline and made a... bold choice.
Sight-unseen
We made an offer, without ever stepping inside the place! Making an offer sight-unseen, but that's so risky!? Yep. But we think it's probably also the only reason we got the place. We were not the first or only party interested in the place. Apparently, one particularly eccentric (and perhaps wealthy, if not all that well) woman from the other side of the state even tried to convince the seller to break contract and sell it to her instead, after our offer had been accepted! We suspect that there was only enough motivation/security for the seller to actually allow anyone into the mess of her home, once some money was already on the table. That made it real. And real it was! Rebecca put up a non-insignificant portion of her savings - savings only from the small margin between her frugalness over 15 years and the wages paid by a big-box hardware store, a non-profit care facility "for persons with mild to profound developmental disabilities", and a home-health agency - savings put up for a house we had only see pictures of, from 4 years before..
We did though have a small escape hatch: our offer contained an "inspection contingency clause." That give us one and only one option for take-backsies: our offer depended on the house being inspected, and we could legally back out if we didn't like what the inspector found...
Notes
1: Something I can certainly relate to...
2. It was neither...