HUD Home Purchase- Farmington Hills
Hello All,
I have been planning to purchase my first property for about a year now. So I have finally decided to pull the trigger. I have been checking Redfin, Realtor.com, hudhomestore.com, Zillow, trulia, Homepath and FSBOs for a property. Well I found a foreclosed property through HUD and decided to do a walk through. The house seemed SOLID, to me at least. Of course I will have to see what the inspectors find. But it still had all of the appliances in it, which was surprising for a foreclosure. Anyway, the purpose of this post is to guide you all through this process as I go through it. Here are a few details on the property:
3 br, 2 bath ranch, 1300 sq ft, hardwood floors everywhere accept for the bedrooms and bathrooms and an attached 2 car garage.
I will house hack this property, and then I should be able to rent it for at least $1400/mo, based on my research through zillow, craigslist and rentometer (I will be getting MLS data pretty soon). The list price was $89,000 and I offered $93,500 with HUD paying 3% of the closing costs. I wasn't expecting the offer to be accepted, but I got the email from my broker saying that it was. I will not get excited until the inspections are over. So with HUD, when your offer is accepted, you have, literally, 2 business days to sign all of the sales contract documents and send them to the asset manager, which is Sage Acquisitions in my case.
I just sent those documents in yesterday and I will contact my broker in the morning to see if the documents reached their destination. As soon as my offer was accepted (The sales agreement is not executed until Sage signs it and sends it back), I contacted all of the utility companies to see how much it would cost to activate things and how much lead time would be needed. I am trying to coordinate this process so that all utilities are on at once for the inspector. It costs $150 to activate water and the gas and electric companies send you a bill for the time that you have their utilities active. I also called a few contractors for dewinterization costs (Foreclosed properties are often winterized). This costs $100.
So as of right now, I am waiting for Sage to sign the sales agreement, which can take up to 2 weeks. Then I will begin my "Due Diligence" phase, which is 15 days.
Feel free to ask any questions. I will update this post as I go through this process. I just want to let everyone learn from me, as I know people are discouraged by the "complicated" HUD home buying process. Wish me luck!!