My husband and I flew down to Fort Myers, FL., last month to see if we could find a nice retirement home to buy across the river in Cape Coral.
We focused on Cape Coral because it is one of the nation's foreclosure capitals with many homes for sale at bargain prices. I've always liked a good sale.
I wanted to get a house in Florida so I could sell my jewelry at the art fairs down there. Michigan and Florida are two of the hot spots for art fairs. This will double the number of shows I can do within a radius of an hour or two from my homes.
Months before our visit, I contacted a Realtor in Cape Coral about having her show us some homes. She got us a Listingbook account that sends out daily listings of homes for sale in the area. It allows you to mark homes as favorites, rank they by price and features and put notes on the listings.
Over the summer,I marked as favorites more than a hundred homes I thought might be possibilities. A few days before we left, I culled the list down to under 50. My plan was to drive by the homes and decide which ones we wanted to have the Realtor show us.
We stayed in Bonita Springs thanks to our daughter's in-laws who generously let us use their timeshare. I had marked some homes in Bonita Springs and several other towns between there and Cape Coral to the north.
Our first day out, we eliminated more than half the homes we had marked. Since we were looking for cheap homes, many were rundown and in rundown neighborhoods. By the third day, we had our list for the realtor. We had eliminated all but five homes, a disappointment given the long list I had started with.
One of the five homes already was going to auction, so we viewed the other four. One was owned by a woman who needs to audition for the television show "Hoarders." Another one was on a canal but smelled like cat pee. Another one was practically brand new and on a pretty canal but was close to a busy parkway. Wayne loved it but I hated the noise. We weren't able to see the fourth because our Realtor could not get the owner to consent to a visit that day.
We were a little depressed at that point. Our realtor suggested that we look at Listingbook again and see if we could find more homes with pools on canals, since those were the ones we really liked. So we traveled back to Bonita Springs and logged onto the internet on the laptop we had brought down to aid us in our hunt.
We found several more homes to look at and decided to jump back in the car and drive back to Cape Coral to look at those before the sun went down. All but one were duds once we looked at the neighborhoods. But the last one looked PERFECT! It was vacant, so the lawn needed to be mowed and the pool looked scuzzy, but it was only four years old and in a newer section of town.
We emailed our Realtor to have her set up a showing, and we met her there the following morning. The house was just what we were looking for: three bedrooms, two baths, a pool and a canal with a boat dock. And the price was right. The downside: someone had punched some holes in the wall and it was a short sale.
A short sale happens when the sellers owe more on the mortgage than they can get for selling the house. Short sales are good for the sellers as their remaining debt can be excused. But they have to convince the bank holding the mortgage that they will be forced into foreclosure without it. And the bank has to approve the short sale.
The interior damage would not be difficult to fix, so we decided to put in an offer on the home at a price the bank already had approved (two prior offers on this home had fallen through). We were paying cash and the bank had approved the price, so our Realtor expected a swift sale and suggested a Sept. 16 closing.
Alas, that was not to be. I'll explain later.
One of the artisans on ArtFire put together the contest and asked the rest of us if we wanted to kick in money for prizes. Sounded like fun to me, so I bought one Santa and have hidden him in my shop. Merchants had the option of paying to hide up to four Santas, so some shops will have more than one.
