SOLD!

With the pending move to Memphis, we were planning to rent our home here in Nashville because the real estate market is so bad in 2011. We have had homes in our neighborhood sit on the market for 6-12 months...I'm actually not aware of any homes in our neighborhood that have sold in the past year. That, combined with the fact that we knew we would have to take a big loss due to the value of homes now with the market plunge, made us decide not to put the house on the market. We met with a property management company and had the house listed to rent in early June.

We had one person inquire quickly about renting the house, but they were only interested in a 2 year lease and they wanted to pay about $200 less than we were asking per month. We were hesitant to commit to both of those conditions, so decided to say no. In the meantime, we started looking for homes in Memphis and realized that the rental market there wasn't great so we would want to buy (look for a post on that process soon!). We took out a home equity line of credit on our Summit Oaks home so we would have a down payment. I started getting nervous about having 2 mortgages in this real estate environment and also thought that our home would sell easier with our furniture. Ryan came home from Memphis one Friday and said, "I think we should put the house on the market". I laughed.

He convinced me to at least try and see what happened - he said, we'll see if it rents or sells first. I again told him that the house would rent before 1 person even came and looked at it to buy, but we went ahead and talked to Kara Moore, the wife of one of Ryan's friends from CPA, about listing our house. She put it up on the MLS on a Sunday night at 9:30pm and she got a call at 8am the next day with some people who wanted to look at the house. We had an offer by 12:30pm for $5,000 less than our asking price! It was totally a God thing and an answered prayer! He sure showed me!!!

The next few weeks ended up being a little crazy as the new owners wanted to move in before closing and after a lot of back and forth we decided to not take that risk and took an offer that was $10,000 less than our asking price with a later closing date. We also ended up having a small structural issue come up during the inspection so had to have some work done on the house before closing. We got it all done and officially closed last week! I still can't believe it. Look for a post to come on the moving process. In the meantime...this is what I'm going to miss about 473 Summit Oaks Drive: