Our House Went Under Contract Twice and Died Twice — Sixty-Eight Days to a Buyer With $195,000 Down

Eleven fifty-two at night on January 28, folding towels in the laundry room when my phone buzzed with an email one line long. "Lender unable to approve. See attached." I read it four times standing between the dryer and the wall. Our house in Greeley had been under contract for nineteen days with a pre-approved buyer from US Bank, and the whole deal had just ended in a sentence with no signature on it. The towels stayed unfolded.

We were already gone in every way that mattered. My transfer to Boise starts April 6, and the apartment there starts charging us $1,850 a month on March 1 no matter what this house does between now and spring. Two housing payments, one paycheck, and a storage unit in Boise at $214 a month that we rented on optimism. My wife had already said goodbye to the neighbors. The house had not.

Both dead deals had one thing in routine: neither appraiser ever walked thru the front door. Not one door. The buyer who finally took the house never asked for an appraisal at all. It took sixty-eight days, two dead contracts, one missed appraisal, and one down payment wired from a phone at a closing table to learn what that sentence actually costs.

nineteen days of quiet from US Bank

Buyer one came in at full price, $412,000, with conventional financing, a pre-approval letter dated January 6, and a file so clean it looked fully finished except for the underwriting. Days passed. Our agent called it normal quiet, and for nine days it was. The file went to underwriting on day nine and sat there like a car in a ditch. Day seventeen, a Tuesday, the buyer's agent called ours sounding embarrassed before she said a single word.

the deferred loan that reset the ratios

The denial letter ran four pages, and the whole thing turned on one line item. The buyer carried $41,000 in federal student loans in deferment, and the underwriter now counted a hypothetical $429 a month against his debt-to-income ratio, which pushed him from 43 percent to 46.8 percent against a 45 percent cap. Forty-three to forty-six point eight because a servicer reported a payment that did not exist yet. His loan officer appealed it on day twenty-one. US Bank said no on day twenty-two, and our house went back to active with nineteen days of market time burned and the towels still in a pile.

buyer two and the appraiser who never came

The second contract landed February 3 at $407,500 with a buyer financed thru loanDepot, and this one had a clock buried in it: a 30-day rate lock at 6.25 percent, locked January 29. The appraisal got scheduled for February 13. The appraiser no-showed. Rescheduled for February 18, snow day, no call, no email, nothin' on the portal. By the time the appraisal company could come back it was March 5, the lock had about a day left, and pricing had moved enough that the buyer's monthly number jumped $131.

the rate lock died on day fifty-six

He asked us for a concession covering the $131 difference. I said no on the spot. I hashed it out with my wife at the kitchen table in about ten minutes: we offered $2,000 toward closing, which covered approximately sixteen months of it. He walked away anyways, March 6, day fifty-six, and the house went active for the third time while our Boise apartment sat unused forty minutes from my new office. The buyer figured out his budget the way everyone does, on the last possible day.

the $404,000 offer I still think about

During those fifty-six days, a woman in a Bronco jacket offered $404,000 with a 25-day close and a lender letter conveniently written by her own brother-in-law at a bank I had to look up. We said no anyway. We turned it down cuz we had a contract in hand and a rule about not gettin' greedy. Contracts, I had just absorbed, are not money til a title office says so. She closed on a house in Evans three weeks later for $399,000 and I have never once driven past it.

an offer with $195,000 down

Buyer three showed up March 12 with a credit union pre-approval and a down payment of $195,000 on a $408,500 price. Forty-eight percent down. He waived the appraisal entirely, which nobody hasta twist your arm to drop at that loan-to-value, and kept the inspection but marked it informational, no re-trade, walk-away rights only. His underwriting took nine days, because the bank was lending $213,500 on a $408,500 house and the automated system saw nothing worth an appraiser's visit. Nobody's ratios mattered. Nobody's servicer could reset 'em.

day sixty-eight, three signatures

We signed at a title office in Fort Collins on March 18, sixty-eight days from the first listing. Three signatures, no drama. Buyer three wired his down payment from his phone while we initialed the last page. He told us he had rented in three states and was done renting, and that was the entire conversation about it. The title company's wire desk confirmed the down payment, the payoff figures, and every signature in the file in eleven minutes flat, start to finish, while we stood there drinking bad coffee.

what waiting actually cost

Sixty-eight days of carrying a house we had budgeted to carry for forty, and the meter on it never stopped once in between the two dead contracts, not for a holiday, not for the snow. Extra mortgage interest: $2,340. Utilities and lawn: $420. The Boise storage unit from March 1: $214. One week in a hotel between closings: $610. Total: $3,584 for the privilege of two dead contracts. The towels got folded in Boise eventually. Two buyers, sixty-eight days, $3,584, and one guy with $195,000 down who never needed an appraiser to cross the street. That is it. That is what cash-ish buys.