After this rant from six weeks ago about what, at the time, was characterized as our unsuccessful attempt to purchase a short sale property here in Bozeman, Montana, it will surely come as a surprise to most of you to learn that, while we were on vacation over the last month, the deal somehow came back to life and it is now done.

We closed two days ago.

Five-and-a-half months after we made the offer.

Now, the reason for not saying anything about this until today is that, up until the very end, we really weren’t sure that the deal would get done.

Any of you who have been involved as a buyer in a short sale surely know that there are many twists and turns along the way to a 50-50 chance (at best) of actually completing the sale and, just when you think you’ve got a clear shot to the goal line, something comes up that either nixes the deal or sets it back by a couple months.

In recent weeks, we again had more painful waits for the bank to respond with final approval letters and there were thousands of dollars in closing costs that we thought sure they would try to stick us with and some repairs that were sorely needed, none of which we ended up having to pay for.

It’s as if the short sale gods smiled upon us.

Since we’ve now transitioned from aspiring homeowner to homeowners that desperately need to get some work done on the place before we move next week, things will be spotty here at the blog for a bit, however, there are a few details of this story that you might be interested in that I’m able to share today.

To be clear, we did indeed “walk away” from the deal last month and we did pick up our earnest money deposit as detailed here previously in Our Short Sale Offer – “We’re Done”. This came after the following sequence of events that, someday, I’ll go back and read with a glass of wine in hand and have a good chuckle:

Here’s how it all went down…

We had clearly reached our breaking point after we got a second counter offer from the bank in September (that was $20,000 higher than the aborted counter offer we got in July) and this came during a clusterf#@k of a weekend where we only got bits and pieces of information up until Sunday afternoon before the offer expired on Monday morning.

It didn’t matter though, because after hearing the number, I knew we were done, these thoughts from last month capturing the sentiment:

At this point, we’re more interested in the process being over than we are in getting the house. If we get the house, fine. If not, fine. We just want this to be over.

We had a trip planned for late-September/early-October and, after having toyed with the idea of moving to Pennsylvania for some time (where I have friends and relatives), we decided to get the short sale monkey off our back and go look at some houses there in the Lehigh Valley, the anticipation of which helped fill the void that was left behind.

As it turned out, after looking at a few places, we quickly realized that, while you can get a lot more house for the money there, you also get a lot more people and traffic and crazed truck drivers and all sorts of things that you don’t get when there are only a hundred thousand or so people living within a hundred miles of you.

Plus, having gotten used to wide open spaces, the densely treed rolling hills that you see up and down the East Coast almost felt claustrophobic.

We gave it a shot, but it wasn’t to be.

After a wonderful visit with friends and family, we pointed the car West again and wondered what lie in store for us over the winter in Montana with no real prospects for a home purchase.

While in Pennsylvania, we did get a call from our realtor telling us that, somehow, the bank had decided to get another BPO (Brokers Price Opinion – the bane of many failed short sale deals). But, after having lived with a pending short sale offer for the last five months, we didn’t get our hopes up.

I think I said, “OK. Knock yourselves out.”

We will forever remember Minneapolis, Minnesota because, while checking into a hotel there my cell phone rang and our realtor informed us that the bank had come back with yet another counter offer, exactly matching the price that I made clear we were willing to pay back on May 12th when we first made our offer.

I said to my wife, “It’s Patrick.”

I paused and then I said, “OK. We’ll take it”.

My wife had no idea that I had just verbally agreed to a counter offer to buy the house that, after having left Pennsylvania with more house hunting disappointment, we wanted more than ever but couldn’t have. I had to explain the conversation a couple of times as negotiations are never straightforward in a short sale, but the bank had indeed agreed to a lower purchase price, one that we were happy to pay.

We signed and faxed documents from Minnesota to Montana and, after another few stressful weeks where we sometimes doubted that it would close as scheduled (due largely to getting final approval from the bank), we got to the finish line two days ago, exchanging a large cashier’s check for a set of house keys.

A few points that are worth mentioning.

First, you can get a good deal on a short sale, but it doesn’t come without a price and that price is that the entire process will take a toll on you in ways that you can’t imagine until you go through it. If you’re single or purchasing an investment property, that’s an entirely different situation, but if you’re trying to buy a place where you and your family will live for many years, the normal home buying emotional roller coaster feels like it’s being operated by a madman.

Second, whoever left a comment saying something like, “He who wants it least gets the best price” hit the nail squarely on the head because, even though we really did want the house during the entire process, our sudden exit compelled the bank and listing agent to regroup, ultimately coming back with a much more attractive offer.

Lastly, maybe banks aren’t quite as heartless and evil as I believed last month. More likely, they’re just slow and so overwhelmed with distressed sales and, now, the foreclosure crisis, that they just appear to be uncaring and sinister. After having heard horror stories of banks’ behavior in the days before or the day of closing, we were expecting the worst, but it was a smooth closing.

One last note. I met the seller last Friday in order to get a couple of questions answered that arose during the home inspection and to buy some personal property that he no longer had any use for. He’s a real nice guy and probably typical of short sellers in this price range in that the bursting of the housing and credit bubble just did him in – he thought he was on a roll, he got overextended back when banks would lend money to anybody, he thought he was getting rich (well, he was, on paper), and then it all fell apart when prices started to fall.