The day I cursed investment companies.

I wanted to tell the story of our “offer” that fell through, mostly because when I was looking to it myself on the old interwebs, I couldn’t find anything about the company that wanted to buy our house…so…here it is.

A few weeks ago, I got a phone call from our realtor, letting us know that she got an email with an offer for our house. Odd for a few reasons…one was that the offer was from a corporation, and another being they’d never even seen our house. They were based out of Illinois, and offered us about $15K less than our asking price. CASH. It even came with a proof of funding letter. Not horrible, but too low for us to accept. Our realtor told us the company’s name, IH2 Property Illinois, so of course I immediately started Googling. I found that they’re owned by Blackstone Group, one of the largest investment companies out there, and are purchasing mass quantities of single family homes across the country. They invest a little money, and then rent the homes out. Immediately the hubs was against even entertaining their offer. While we couldn’t find any information about people who had sold their homes to them, we did find a bunch of stuff on Yelp and other sites – mostly people who thought they were a shitty group of landlords. While I wasn’t exactly happy with selling my house that I love to a company that was seemingly a bunch of jerks…I also wanted to sell my house. (Duh.) And without much else coming in for serious interest in our home, I talked the hubs into a counter offer.

We countered $13K more than their offer, they countered back at the halfway point…which was exactly what we needed to break even on our home. We were STOKED. It was finally happening! We signed their offer with a counter-proposal addendum attached with the newly agreed upon purchase amount, and sent it to them. The next day, they scheduled an inspection. The inspector came and went, and it came to my attention that IH2 had never signed our counter-proposal, nor had they sent any earnest money. That started to worry me, but our realtor assured us that everything was fine, and would let us know when she heard anything. On that Friday, we had been told that the Purchase Agreement papers and the inspection report had been delivered to the buyers and we would hear something on Monday.

Meanwhile, the hubs and I are quietly and excitedly talking about our moving plans, storage units, when to start looking for our home. We both tried not to get excited – we knew this wasn’t finished yet.

Monday rolls around, and finally, by 2pm our realtor calls. Her first words are “Bad news.” I almost fainted. Like, this COULD NOT be happening. Instead of everything being fine, they countered again. This time, at $30K LESS than our agreed upon purchase amount. THIRTY THOUSAND DOLLARS LESS. May I remind you that our agreed upon amount would leave us with nothing. Breaking even…but walking away with NOTHING. At first I panicked and thought that there was something MAJORLY wrong with our house. What could need $30K in repairs?!

Our realtor emailed their local agent (along with a counter from us for $10K than our agreed upon amount, because EFF YOU JERKS) who responded that they could not work with our counter offer, and that it was nothing that was found during the inspection, but they determined they would need to invest that much in the home in order for the deal to work with them. Okay…first? GREAT! Put $30K of work into my house! Guess what? I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO PAY FOR IT. Second? I hate you. He also mentioned in the email that if we ever want to “work with their offer” to contact them. Sure…when I have a dump truck of money for closing, I’ll give you guys a holler.

So…like I said in my previous post…dead in the water.

We’re pulling our house from the MLS on Thursday while we’re on vacation, and so that we can enjoy the rest of the summer without having to worry about house showings and stress and whatnot. We’ll probably decide over the next week if we put it back up again in September or wait until Spring.

I’m so over all of this. I’m seriously going to find a statue of St. Joseph and bury that shit in my front yard. HOUSE BE GONE.