Finished all of the settlement wackiness in about an hour and a half.

Went to the bank in the morning to acquire a certified check.  Luckily I have a PNC account where the fee for getting a certified check is waived.  Certainly pays to retain those last few ties that I have to Pittsburgh.

Met up with Frank who was sitting in for Bob on my day of settlement.  We did a final home walkthrough/inspection to make sure that the place was still there, intact, and all the components that were agreed to on the contract were left behind.  It went pretty quickly, as the previous owners did a good job of cleaning the place, and everything was quickly verified to be in proper working order.  Supposedly not everyone does the final walkthrough/inspection on the day of settlement.  Just seems like a terrible way of having major catostrophies occur to the property between the last time that it was seen and when it was bought.

At the Coldwell banker office, the settlement process seemed to go pretty smoothly.  Amusingly enough the seller’s agent also had a prior commitment, so both agents were substitutes.  There’s the occasional odd question(the sellers were asked if they were continuously married during the duration that they owned the place for example), but in the end, I bet each of those have a good story behind them.  After a lot of handshakes, and signing of tons of paper(which I didn’t read all of) I’m now the proud owner of a townhome!

Things of note for me to remember that came up during signing:

My FHA loan is apparently transferable.  Which means that if I ever do decide to sell the property later, someone can get it transfered to their name and finish out the payments.  Since I have an absurdly low 5% interest rate, this is a nice selling point.

I should always keep around a copy of my title insurance forever(even if I’m no longer the owner).  There’s the occasional weird circumstance that may require it.

While at my home for the first time(and talking on the phone with my mom while walking around it), I managed to lock myself out by walking out onto the deck and failing to realize that there was an generic non-deadbolt closing lock on the door.  A minute or so of finangling with a credit card got it open, but it just shows that I need to deadbolt that door for security purposes.  Luckiy I don’t live in Cambridge, and thus breaking into my own home is ok.  Also, I’m amazed that I managed to miss the fact that there’s RJ45(Ethernet) scattered throughout the house.  The prior owners apparently put furnature in front of all the jacks as though they were embarassed by it!  Had dinner at Wegmans, which is about a 5 minute walk(I suspect that I’ll be doing this multiple times a day).

As far as the HOA documents, my agent Bob brought them over on Monday afternoon, giving me three days to review them and escaping from the offer.  After the time was up, that contingency automatically goes away.  It’s pretty amazing that a 1/3rd inch binder of poor quality photocopies cost around $350 to create.  Theoretically a PDF version was available for $25 less, but that’s pretty damn crazy.  Doing a bit of digging yielded http://ridgetopcommons.org as the underutilized community web site.  There seemed to be nothing abhorently terrible in them, with the most demanding item being that most exterior changes requiring HOA approval in order to happen(which I think is pretty typical for HOA agreements).  As I had suspected the parking spots right in front of my unit are open parking, which should make having guests over an easy proposition(and thus I can start to work off my hosting debt).

And finally the last contingency that I had was the lender’s letter pending an appraisal.  The appraisal came back at $11k under the sale price for the house.  Pretty drastically below the sale price.  After a bit of discussion with Bob(and indirectly with the selling agent) we came up with some ammo to get the appraiser to reevaluate the appraised value.  One of the interesting points is that for the comparison homes they included the amount of seller assistance in the value, but not for the appraised value of my future place.  With that, and some aspect that we believe that the seller missed, we eventually got a revised appraisal which ended up at $4k below the sale price of the house.  Bringing that back to the seller, ultimately we decided to split the difference, so I get to have pay $2k less overall in exchange for having $2k more down upfront.  Sounds like a good deal to me!

So those three pretty much covers my last contingencies for getting out of this offer unscathed.  Now I have to prepare for settlement(July 30th) and get ready to move.

Today I began the process by meeting with Bob MacIntosh, a realtor who was highly recommended by many of my friends who recently purchased homes(Devin+Beth, Mike+Emily, Tom).  We had discussions about various topics to start to get a feel for my requirements in selecting a home, and thus I’ve started a page to detail them here.  With the listing of open houses, I can formulate a plan for tomorrow to see a variety of them and thus start hammering out my exact requirements.  The key thing that Bob liked to reiterate was that this process is supposed to be fun, which is in stark contrast to the horror stories of high pressure agents who just want to make a sale at the expense of who they are representing.

Handouts:

Poster sized northern Virginia map

List of open houses for tomorrow

Listings of houses in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties

Stack of business cards(to be left at open houses as I visit them)

Homebuyer’s guide from RGS Title(which had a nice home buying workflow that I shamelessly copied to keep track of what I need to d0).

Exclusive Right to Represent Buyer Agreement

Housing market activity report for the last week

Tasks:

Get an ADC map of the area

Visit open houses

Complete and return realtor contract