We (finally) have land!

It's been such a journey folks, I can't even tell you!

Since we last updated in December things have been pretty wild in the Conway-Holmes household. We spent the car ride back from Silver Star discussing our options, took the plunge and called our realtor to make an offer on our favourite lot. It was all very exciting, and then the next day it was Christmas so all house stuff got put on hold!

Christmas was lovely (as was boxing day watching all the trash TV available), and then on the 27th our realtor got back to us with a response from the sellers. Unfortunately we didn't have a whole lot of success negotiating, but we eventually settled on a price we thought was fair.

We were on our way! House offer accepted! Success!

NOT SO FAST, life said.

It turns out that our realtor had been incredibly sneaky (I won't name names on a public site because I was raised better than that, but I'm tempted believe me!) and slipped an extra clause in our contract - under a completely different section I might add - that acknowledged that there was an easement pending registration on the land which we would have to accept if we went through with the offer.

Now really the polite thing for our realtor friend to have done would be to actually tell us that he was adding such a FUNDAMENTALLY BIG AMMENDMENT in the contract, but that would have made things too easy, now wouldn't it?

Once we saw the extent of this easement - which stretched across the whole lower section of the lot taking up about 15% of the available land - and the incredibly unfavourable terms that were in place, it was pretty obvious that this land was a dud and we were forced to pull out of the deal.

(If I had my tin-foil hat on i'd probably rant a bit about how there was clearly some sneaky dealings going on here, but i'll leave that for another day.)

After this absolute mess we were obviously a bit wary of our realtor, so we decided to go back to the lovely Amanda Cormier (who I can name because she's seriously wonderful and I would recommend her to anyone!) from our time looking in Big White, who came swooping in to help us put an offer on a second lot.

This lot was lovely with the most incredible views, but the price ended up being right at the top end of our budget. We probably could have swung it, but then we got advice from some builders that the cost of building the type of home we wanted would be prohibitively expensive on this particular lot, so unfortunately we had to walk away from this one as well.

Next came our third choice lot, which we'd come back to a couple of times over the past month. We liked it but the view wasn't quite what we were hoping for, so we hemmed and hawwed for a couple of days before deciding that it was still worth going for. Unfortunately we were just a hair too slow, and found out that after months with no movement the sellers had accepted an offer the morning we called to make our own offer!

The land gods were clearly taunting us at this point, and I was getting dangerously close to throwing in the towel altogether. Luckily Ben plied me with chocolate and wine and managed to talk me down, and we went back to the site map to scout out our next target.

It was at this point that we realized that the lot next to our original favourite was also for sale! Same views, same elevation, same access to the ski run and most importantly no crazy easement! Why hadn't we seen this lot before you might ask? I truly don't have an answer, I'm just thankful it hadn't already sold.

Best of all, we clearly had our negotiation tactics down by this point as we were able to get an accepted offer of under what we were willing to go to (shhh, don't tell the sellers!)

So now the deposit has been paid, subjects have been removed, and I can finally breathe a very big sigh of relief!