unattainable

As you can probably guess, we still haven't bought a house. The people who owned the last place kept stringing us along for a long time, promising to do what we asked, which was to get an occupancy permit - pretty basic stuff, folks. Despite the promises, there was little follow-through on any practical level.

Finally after we terminated the deal, they had a municipality inspector in and sent us a copy of a letter from the municipality talking about a few minor things that should be fixed. They then fixed one thing on the list and suggested that we fix the rest in order to get the permit, because they were too busy.

Problem is, the letter from the municipality had NOTHING TO DO with getting an occupancy permit. Slimy little weasels. We said no. They fixed most of the things on the list and sent us the exact same letter again, with a handwritten note on it saying all the stuff that had been done...

... and we were supposed to pretend that was an occupancy permit? Really? No, I mean, REALLY?

So yeah, we've started our search all over again. This time we're not going to try to buy exactly what we want. We're going to buy a cheap little place that's reasonably easy to sell again, and in a few years we will buy raw land and build our own house on it, and it will be exactly what we want.

With that having been said, we've already had another adventure. We found a place about an hour from where we are now that we wanted to look at. Our real estate agent is about two and a half hours from there and suggested that we view it with the listing agent to save him five hours of driving. I'm fine with that - if we like it, our agent will come up, and we'll also have him on our side for negotiations. We've looked at places like that before.

So we call the listing agent, who turns out to be sort of a nasty person. She is obviously annoyed that we want to view the house with her in light of the fact that we have an agent, and multiple phone calls from us AND from our agent don't convince her. She tersely promises to call our agent back to discuss the matter and nobody hears from her for the rest of the day. Our agent jokes that she is too greedy to share commission with another agent.

Magically, the next morning, there is suddenly an offer on the place, and the only agent involved is the nasty listing agent! This means that she deliberately avoided showing us the place before "her" people had a chance to look and submit an offer, so that she'd be guaranteed to get the entire commission instead of potentially splitting it with our agent if we made a better offer. That is sneaky and mean and NOT in the best interest of the sellers, who would have benefited from having more than one offer on their house.

Our house hunting skills are rapidly degenerating. We are now not even capable of looking at a house, let alone buying one.

Actually having our own place has turned into a sort of fantasy for me. It's this mythical, unattainable thing and seems so very far from reality at this point in time.