Several Updates

Investor Properties
As I reported yesterday, another HUD offer was rejected. Last night, I found out two more were rejected (a HUD and an REO). The HUD rejections came with a message that reads "Another purchaser's offer was acknowledged for this property", thus I'm assuming I was outbid. So, here is my updated list ...

1. REO. Offer rejected by bank.
2. REO. Offer rejected by bank.
3. REO. Bank countered. I countered. Bank sitting on their price for now.
4. REO. Offer rejected with no counter. Resubmitted at $10k more.
5. HUD. Offer was rejected due to being outbid.
6. HUD. Offer submitted.
7. HUD. Offer was rejected due to being outbid.
8. REO. Currently in 2nd position.
9. HUD. Offer was rejected due to being outbid.
10. VA. Need to talk with loan officer. Requires ~$6k in closing.
11. HUD. In 2nd position
12. HUD. Submitted offer.
13. REO. Made initial offer (see below).
14. FNMA. Have not submitted offer yet.
15. FNMA. Have not submitted offer yet.

Offer #13
This is the property my wife and I are looking at for ourselves. We met our RE agent last night at the property again to have another walk-thru. Now that we are serious about it being our own, we wanted to really inspect the house for any needed future repairs. After spending about 45 mins in the house, we decided to make an initial offer of $205,000. As mentioned before, the home is an REO that was originally listed at $260,000, but has since dropped to $249,900. The lender put in about $20,000 worth of upgrades (crown/chair molding, carpet, paint, vinyl, dishwasher, cooktop, oven, from what we could see). We asked our agent if she could give us the complete list from the lender. There were a lot of things still needing repair, though. For instance, the secondary bathroom upstairs needs a new tub and tile work. The powder room needs a new toilet. The deck outside is rotting, and will need replaced. The microwave oven looks like the original (not sure why they didn't replace it as they are cheap). The master shower is in bad condition. And so on. We can still move in it today, but it will probably need about $10k-$20k more work to be in tip-top condition. Another thing we wanted to see was storage space. We found two coat closets downstairs, a storage closet under the staircase, another closet at the top of the stairs, and it has a huge walk-in pantry that can be used for more storage, if need be. Not to mention regular closets in the bedrooms, and a huge utility room.

We just have to wait and see if the bank wants to deal. I told our agent we were willing to go up to the comp price ($230k), if it goes that far, but if the lender doesn't want to bargain, then we'll drop it.