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Now that its finally come to its conclusion, I can give an overview of the saga as it pertains to my first home purchase.

It all started in the summer of 2010. (Actually it probably started earlier than that – we first saw the house on the MLS when it was a new listing – but at that time, the price far exceed the value.) The ad had one picture of the front of the house. No interior pictures. This automatically raised a red flag with us. Our experience is that anything that only had one photo was usually a train wreck in need of major rehab – particularly given the price range in which we were looking. That said, after having it keep coming up in our searches for month after month, curiosity got the best of us, and we finally decided to give it a look.

Now keep in mind that for the longest time, I was always looking for something with land. (I almost bought a 20 acre parcel back in 2004 with an intent to flip it, but that's another story entirely). This particularly house had land (about 12 acres) which is why it kept catching my eye.

So we went and saw it. To our surprise, it was well built, and in good shape overall. Granted it needed some cosmetic work and updating, but it wasn't the disaster we had envisioned. After much discussion, my wife and I decided to make a low ball offer on the place – we knew that it was due to go to foreclosure a few weeks later, so we figured maybe the bank that held the note would bite at a lowball number.

Sadly, our offer was not accepted. But the foreclosure never occurred. The owner declared bankruptcy, literally a few hours before the auction was supposed to be held. That put the breaks on everything.

Although we moved on to other houses, I kept checking the status of the bankruptcy proceedings, just in case. Finally, in the fall of 2011 (almost a full year later) the bank that held the note on the house petitioned the judge to throw out the case. It seems that the owner had been self employed and was unable or unwilling to furnish tax returns to the courts. So, in December of 2011 I attended my first auction at the courthouse steps.

That in and of itself was a learning experience. First, the referee overseeing the sale mistook me for the bank's representative. (I was the only on there, and I was wearing a newly pressed suit and tie.) Although I thought I was about to get what I was looking for, it turns out they could not start the proceedings until the plaintiff was present.

Secondly it turns out that minimum bid is irrelevant. The bank opened with a bid of, I kid you not, $200. Realizing what was going on, I threw a bid out of $500. The bank's representative go so agitated that he countered with the “minimum bid”. And with that, the bank took back the house.

The next morning I faxed an offer directly to their attorney. After about a month of follow up without any reply form them, I called the bank directly. Thankfully it was a small local operation, and I was able to get the person handling the file on the phone. They had never seen my offer. Intense negations' began. Although initially we were almost $100,000 apart, I was able to close the gap and they came down significantly more than I went up. All of this was pending inspection of course. And we couldn't get in there until the previous owner vacated (he was still living in the house). It was early April that I finally was able to do our inspection.

At this point I expected the thing would be trashed. Looking back on it, every foreclosure I had ever seen had at a minim, busted walls and missing appliances. Strangely, this house looked almost exactly as I had remembered it. No undue damage by the evictee on his way out. He even had finished the master bath that was only half done the first time I had seen the property.

I did do my best to renegotiate the price – it turns out that by that time, there was a backup offer on the property (which I was able to independently verify) so I had very little leverage, but was able to get some concessions with respect to some of the immediate work that was needed, including the removal of an underground oil tank. (which had it leaked, would have killed the deal, but thankfully, there were no issues).

So now here we are at the start of summer, ready to do a few minor things and then we could close. But summer resulted in delay after delay. This guy was on vacation, that guy was unavailable, etc. etc. The offer was also predicated on a survey. What I thought would take a few days took six weeks. That's my fault as I was told up front it would take that long, I just didn't see how. Now I do.

So by the time fall came around and we were ready to close, it seemed as if we couldn't get peoples schedules lined up. We finally set the closing date for the end of October only to have it delayed by the storm. So now, finally, a little over two years later, our quest has ended.

Lessons learned?

1) Be persistent
2) Double check, then triple check – had I not been diligent, mistakes in paperwork WOULD have occurred.
3) Do you best to think of everything – we wanted to make darn sure we knew what we were getting into, particularly given that it was a foreclosure.

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