I'll Believe It When I See It

Slow Bob got the transfer! But that don’t mean anything. (I’d like to stop right here and tell you that I know my English is not always correct—I should have said, “That doesn’t mean anything,”—but I am writing how I speak, just like I would if we were sitting across the table from each other having a cup of coffee. Not to say I always know what’s correct English. However sometimes I know when it’s not right and I do it anyway.)

So Bob got the transfer. We got more hay yesterday anyway.
Even though everything looks pretty good at this point, I have no faith that it will actually happen. According to Bob’s banker, the only thing we’re waiting for now is the appraisal. Since we keep lowering the price every time we lose a buyer and put it back on the market, the last appraisal is twenty thousand dollars higher than what Bob is paying. And since we never stop working on it (since the last appraisal, we’ve painted ceilings, put pea gravel in the tractor shed, installed a new ceiling light, put ferns on the porch…) the amount of the appraisal shouldn’t be a problem.

The loan officer said, “Just as long as there are good comps, we should be good to go!”

I assured her, “Oh yeah, there are plenty of good comps!”

But there aren’t. I live in a town of about a thousand people. We’re out in the middle of nowhere. And this is a place people don’t move away from. People stay here. What are the chances that, at any given time, there will be a farm exactly like mine for sale?—a four bedroom house with one bathroom and with real horse facilities including a riding arena on ten acres? There’s a house for sale down the block right now. It has two acres, three bathrooms, no horse facilities and it’s on the highway. There’s another one in the other direction that has around the same acres as mine and a similar horse barn. But no house. (Of course serious horse people don’t care about houses. Just give us a barn with water and electric and a place to plug in the coffee pot so we can make a bran mash for the old guy in the winter.) A couple of miles down the road there’s an old dairy farm on sixty acres for sale. None of them are really comparable to mine. What are they going to want? A cookie-cutter house in the middle of a development that’s the same as all the other ones except the kitchen is beige and not blue?

So it’s going to depend on how much of a stickler Bob’s bank is going to be. And that means I had to go and get more hay.

Getting Ready For Winter

We had to get hay. There was no getting around it. We could be here for a while. Our latest buyer, let’s call him Bob, got turned down for a mortgage because the bank thinks his commute to work is too long. You’ve got that right. The bank is suddenly concerned about a borrower’s quality of life and butts into decision-making like a meddling mother-in-law who gives the baby a pacifier, or takes it away—whatever she deems is right—because the mother of the baby is obviously an idiot.

I warned Bob about the trouble the banks were giving people who tried to get a mortgage to buy this place. Bob told me if he got the house he planned to transfer to one of his company’s branches closer to home after he got settled in. But in the meantime he would commute. Admittedly, it wasn’t close. Almost two hours. Just like what my girlfriend’s husband does who owns a car dealership up in New Jersey and less than what my other girlfriend’s husband does who works in Manhattan. Sometimes you have to travel for good things.

I advised him not to mention his plans to the bank. If he transferred, they’d claim he got a new job and they don’t give mortgages to people with new jobs. I said don’t give them any ammunition. Don’t even mention it. Don’t tell them that I have a really nice riding arena and you could give riding lessons if you wanted to even though you don’t plan to. Don’t even say it. (They rejected my first buyer because of that. Didn’t want her to rely on paying her mortgage by giving riding lessons even though she was a registered nurse and in fact took riding lessons on her days off.) I warned him: don’t say anything.

But who knew they’d have a problem with the commute? It didn’t even occur to me and I don’t know if it occurred to Bob because he was fine with it. Why should it bother anyone else? I have no idea how the bank found out. Are they Mapquesting the distance people go to work in addition to pulling credit reports and looking at tax returns? What’s next? Will they ask for proof that you own a riding lawnmower because push mowers require too much energy? Will they ask for references from people who will vouch that you know your way around a toolbox and can fix a broken window and repair the heater if it conks out? That actually makes sense. You would think maintaining their investment would be more of a concern to them than worrying about how far the borrower has to drive.

Bob hasn’t given up. He’s trying to get the transfer. But I don’t have a lot of confidence. Last year we thought we were closing, so we didn’t cut wood. I’m too cheap to use the electric heat continuously so I got ripped off buying a dump truck full of wood that turned out to be so green it sizzled and spit like driftwood just washed up on the beach and had to be resplit because the pieces were so big and heavy I could only carry one at a time. And you know how strong I am. I don’t want that to happen again even though getting hay is the worst job in the world. I’d rather clean sheaths. I’d rather weed-whack all the monkey weed or the pig weed, whatever that crap is that grows on the bank behind the arena like it’s on steroids. Forget manure. Even though most people would lump manure in with the sheaths and the weed-whacking, I like picking it up because that’s when I do all my thinking. That’s when my mother talks to me.

At any rate, we had to go and get the hay because I have no faith Bob is going to get the transfer and I think we’re going to be stuck here for the winter, possibly forever. Kurt was kicking and screaming. He’s sick of this farm stuff. It doesn’t help that he hasn’t ridden the horses since we moved out of Jersey eight years ago. And that was the whole point. The horses. But all he’s been doing is building barns and building fences and fixing houses and then fixing houses more so we could sell the houses. We thought we were going to kick back in the country. Have a nice, slower-paced life. Sit on the porch with a glass of iced tea and a slice of blackberry pie; maybe mosey down to the barn for a ride once in a while. But he spends more time and energy maintaining things, fixing things and trying to get rid of the things that we fixed than actually partaking in the rocking chairs on the front porch or the triple gates we installed on the riding arena so we could enter and exit on three sides or the manicured trails he keeps in tip-top condition because you never know when someone’s going to want to come and look at the house. He doesn’t even have a horse anymore since Kelly took over Bullet. So he was not happy about the hay.

The thing about hay is you have to get it while it’s available. It’s not like Jersey where you can pick up the phone once a month and say you want some and the hay guy delivers and stacks it on Thursday. Here, you’ve got to go get it yourself. And you’ve got to get it while the going’s good. Because the farmer won’t store it for you. Even if he had a place to store it, he’s not doing it. You want it, you come and get it right now before Wesley Bell comes and gets it because Wesley just picked up a couple of nice Walkers down at the sale and they need some groceries right quick. Hay, in the land of hay, is somehow a commodity that’s in short supply. At least if you want hay without mold or Johnson grass or crushed up cans and Styrofoam cups baled up with it. And it’s almost impossible to get delivered.

We got 95 bales at the crack of dawn on Sunday morning after going out for Kurt’s birthday the night before. We tried to schedule it for later so Kurt could sleep a little on his only day off. I claimed the horses were on a strict schedule regarding their meals and we would come over after they ate their breakfast but the hay lady was having none of it. She had something else to do and wasn’t waiting around for us to buy her hay. She’s one of the few around here who doesn’t go to church so I don’t know what else she had going on that was more important than getting three hundred dollars in a place where people work half a week to bring home that kind of money and where by the looks of her house—blue tarp on the roof, plywood on a window—she could use.

We’re going to need another four hundred to get through the winter. Three hundred if you go by Kurt. Five hundred if you go by me. And we’re going to have to go back before Wesley Bell gets them. I don’t even want to think about the wood.

Stuck in Virginia

Every time I get my heart set on a house, something always happens to mess it up. This time we waited until everything looked like it was a done deal with my buyer. Let’s call him Kip. Kip was pre-approved, his buyer was pre-approved, plus his buyer didn’t have a house to sell so we didn’t have to worry about that. Kip’s buyer had already done the inspections on Kip’s house and everything was good there.

I even called the loan officer myself. He said that with Kip’s 20% down, one year’s worth of mortgage payments in escrow (because of relocating and having to start his business over fresh), his good credit and loan-to-debt ratio, there would be no problem. He said Kip was “strong.” The last thing I did was wait for Kip’s buyer to get his mortgage commitment. I covered Kip. I covered Kip’s buyer. Then we went house hunting. We looked at the nuclear reactor house, we looked at the house on the highway, we looked at the house that even I would set a match to.

The Alloway house was funny. The Alloway house was the very first house we were interested in back in the winter when we sold the house the first time but we never went to look at it because it was quite a bit over our price range and the listing agent said the owner wasn’t negotiable. She called it a thorn in her side and said she’d taken dozens of people to see it but he wouldn’t budge a penny. He wanted close to three hundred thousand and our price range was low 200’s so no sense going. But now, lo and behold, it was down to $249,900, plus a new septic tank had been installed. Sometimes things are a blessing in disguise! Our new agent happily took us to see it.

I can’t even go into telling you about it. I’m too upset. By the time I posted the last story about house hunting and was getting ready to tell you about what we got, it’s over. After everything I did to micromanage the deal, all the checking and double-checking I did, after everything I did to make sure everyone was doing their job and no one was leading me on to believe that my buyer could get a mortgage when he couldn’t, the deal fell through.

I found out the day I found out my father passed out on the kitchen floor, woke up vomiting blood, and got himself to the hospital by crawling to the phone and dialing 911. He’s okay now but this is why I have to get home! This is it in a nutshell!

I’m starting to think I’m stuck in Virginia. No matter how well-priced my house is, no matter if I keep selling it over and over again, no bank is going to lend anyone any money to buy it. We gave them all that money to bail them out, and yes, I understand that they’re cautious now and they should be, they shouldn’t have been lending people money for houses they couldn’t afford in the first place. But I keep bringing them buyers who can afford my house and it’s a good house, priced under the appraisal, and if these people can’t get loans, no one’s getting loans. The bank is sitting on all the money and foreclosing on people’s property—they’re like the king—they’re keeping it all! No wonder why the economy is still at a standstill….

The banks aren’t the only bad guys. You’ve also got the henchmen. That’s the lawyers. This is how it all played out: Kip’s buyer learned ten inches of Kip’s backyard was in one of FEMA’s newly designated flood zones and would require flood insurance. Supposedly Kip wasn’t aware of this. Kip’s buyer’s lawyer advised him to ask for more money off the house to “remedy the situation.” I can just picture what he said. “It’s a buyer’s market! You can get another twenty grand off the house for that!” Everyone was happy up until that point, including Kip’s buyer, a first-time home buyer who loved Kip’s house, but was, naturally, afraid to cross his lawyer, and his parents, who were hovering during the entire process like a new mother over a preemie in a crib and were now nodding their heads vigorously because they had such a good lawyer.

Kip said no; he couldn’t afford to give any more money off the house because then he wouldn’t be able to buy mine. I offered to give him another five thousand off the price of my house and the real estate agents offered to take less of a commission to help him make the deal happen. The real estate agents even got the seller of the Alloway house to contribute five grand. Then it was a roller coaster ride. One minute Kip and his buyer came to an agreement, the next minute they didn’t. It was on, it was off, it was on, it was off.

Pretty soon I’m going to be in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer just like my father if this keeps up.

Finally it was on. But then, even though we all kicked in money, Kip still had to lower the price of his house to satisfy his buyer, and now he didn’t have enough money for the 40% down payment the bank wanted. Yeah, if you’re sharp, you caught that. First the bank told us 20%. Now it was forty. I couldn’t believe it. I specifically discussed this with the loan officer myself in the beginning of this process because I didn’t want what happened with my last buyer to happen with this one—the bank leading us all on. But now 20% wasn’t enough. By the time I thought it was safe and bought a house, 20% morphed into 40%. Kip only had 35%. Plus Kip learned that the interest rate on the loan was over 8%, double the going rate.

So the deal is off. And now we are probably going to lose the Alloway house because I was bidding against someone else who wanted it and the reason the seller accepted our offer was because we assured him it was a done deal down here, we were closing, everything had gone through and all we had to do was pack. I suppose there’s a chance the other person who wanted it found another house. Or maybe he won’t be able to get a mortgage the way the banks are holding on to the money. Maybe a miracle will happen and I’ll sell my farm to someone else who actually can close before the Alloway seller finds someone new. I have been getting action. Someone is doing a drive-by right now as I write. I even have someone who came right out and said he wants it but can’t buy it till August when his divorce becomes final.

In the meantime, I can’t even tell you about the Alloway house because I’m so upset.