What a Way to Go: Network

My daughter and her husband decided bug out time had arrived from their comfortable home in a suburb of Denver. I'm desperately disappointed that they did not choose to leap in this direction, but at least they decided to get out of Dodge. They decided in December to put their home on the market. Bad timing? Yeah, well, while housing prices are crashing around their heads doesn't seem like a wonderful time to become a seller, but...

Their house had been appraised (at the height of absurd appraisals) at $300,000 about three years ago. Therefore, with a $50,000 mortgage remaining on the house, they should have $250,000 equity, right? The chances of actually finding a buyer at that rate seemed pretty small, but they decided to go for it anyway, and entered the fray ONE WEEK AGO with an asking price of $300,000.

For the past couple of months, they have been looking for land in southern Colorado. There are no buyers down there these days. Looking for "comps" on one particular piece which was a 70 acre parcel with an 800 sq.ft. house on it, they found that virtually no properties had been sold in the entire area in a year or more. Long story short, after exhaustive looking, they found bare land - 110 acres - the only land in that area with a well already drilled, and put an offer on it on Tuesday - of this week.

In the meantime, they had an offer on their house for $265,000 and had taken no action on the offer while they zipped down south to look at the land they wanted - and while they were down there got a call from their realtor that there was another offer on the table for their Denver house (remember that Denver is one of the areas that has been hard hit with the housing bubble crash). They made their formal offer for the southern land on Tuesday afternoon at a far lower than asking price, and started the long drive home. In the car on the way up, they got another call from the realtor asking to meet with them the next day to discuss another offer - counting? that is three offers now on a house in a buyer's market during a housing crash in an area directly hit with massive foreclosures, less than a week after the house has been put on the market.

Now, just to make the soap opera qualities come into play, they arrived home at 10:30 pm on Tuesday evening after an exhaustive two days of tromping around 110 acres in biting winds and driving snow with a windchill factor down below zero. At 11 pm, there was a knock on their door. It was a police officer with the demand to enter their home because there had been a complaint (unknown assaulter of course) that they were being neglectful of their children due to a dirty house, with snakes and rats in the house. Just to explain the snakes and rats, they had started a business about five years ago breeding ball pythons (selling a good one for around $2500) and had had a rat raising project in the garage of raising rats to feed to the snakes. More than two years ago, they decided to get out of the business because it was clear to them that snakes are something people buy when they have extra money - not a good business choice during the collapse of the economy. So they started selling snakes and had totally eliminated the rat raising process at least a year and a half ago. They have four snakes left, which are housed in a separate room in a totally professional designed set up with temperature controls, etc.

Anyway, they refused the cop entrance without a search warrant. They left the cop standing on the front porch for 25 minutes, during which she sent for backup and had three other cop cars out there, with cops surrounding the property front, back and sides. The cop finally said to them, "Look, you let me in, or I'll have to call CPS out here, and they will come remove your children tonight. They don't need a search warrant to take your children." So, after that particular piece of blackmail, my daughter finally let her come in. The house was a mess, of course, since they had just arrived home after two days south, had brought in all their gear and dumped it, they hadn't done anything to clean the house before they left, and houses without cleaning and three kids home full time (homeschooling) can trash a place in about two hours.

The cop searched, said the house was a mess, said she had to clean it up, made no comment about four snakes in a professional-designed setting, made an appt. to return in two days to see a clean house, and left. So, they stayed up another three hours after getting home exhausted and cleaned.

The next day, several of her friends came over and helped make the house shine. In the meantime, the realtor arranged to come over to go over the offers with them. Yesterday afternoon, while her friends were still there, sitting in the living room having finished cleaning, talking together, and the real estate agent was there sitting in the dining room talking to her husband, and about ten extra kids were there having a good time all over the house - if you're counting, this means there were 13 children, four women, and six men in the house - the cops and social services showed up again. Yeah, even though they had made an appointment for Thursday, they arrived 14 hours after the first visit, demanding to see a clean house.

It was excellent timing. The woman walked into a sparkling clean house in the midst of an obvious social gathering. She couldn't make much comment about the clean house, so demanded to see the snakes. As my daughter was leading her downstairs, she made the comment, "You do realize that snakes are perfectly legal don't you?"

The woman responded, "But I understood you had them loose in the house."

My daughter turned around and in a voice that clearly showed the woman must be crazy said, "Why in the WORLD would I want to have snakes running loose in my house?"

So, she showed them four pythons in snake trays, the fact that there are no rats, a super clean house, and for good measure was able to take her up to the realtor who stated that he had been in the house one week earlier and it had been spotless then also.

All charges were dropped and the case was closed. The realtor presented them with an offer of $308,000 on the house, which they accepted and signed. They received a call right in the middle of the social worker's visit that their offer on the land down south had been accepted.

All this - in a 24 hour period. Wow.

Lua