.com
We first started looking for townhouses south of San Francisco in small communities like Mountain View (home to Google), Redwood Shores (home to Oracle), Cupertino (home to Apple), and others. However, the more time we spent more time in San Francisco, the more we really wanted to live there, specifically in the downtown region. So after about two months of shopping, we narrowed our attention to San Francisco's downtown district.
We've been shopping in the SoMa (South of Market) distict, which is I think is similiar to Toronto's King/Queen West neighbourhoods. It's mostly loft conversions, and there are lots of great lofts here. We saw some amazing units that had lots of interesting character to them, and we fell in love with one unit: 1300 square feet split over 3 stories, with the master bedroom occupying the entire top floor and had a HUGE patio walkout as well. We were close to putting in an offer, but we held off since we wanted to spend some time in the neighbourhood to get a feel for the life there... we spent an afternoon just walking around there, and we discovered it was not a good neighbourhood. Everywhere you go, there's a smell of urine, plus there's trash all over the sidewalks and lots of homeless people milling about. The unit and building are very nice, but we didn't want to live in that neighbourhood.
So we've hit lots and lots and lots of open houses over the past few months, and it's been mostly the same pattern: we'd find a really nice unit, but then walk around the area and realize it's a crappy place to be. Towards the end of August and into September we had not found anything else that we were willing to put an offer on, and we were starting to feel that maybe we wouldn't be buying anything, but a new listing showed up at the end of September and it was promising. It was in a good area, near the baseball park and within walking distance to pretty much everything. We visited the open house and really liked it, then sat back for a week to think about negatives, then visited the open house on the following week and ended up liking it even more. We were sold.
A quick discussion with our real estate agent followed, and then we decided to put in an offer. We met with our agent at his office at about 7:30pm on a Tuesday night, and ended up reading and signing papers for the next three hours!!! That was a very painful experience, especially since Sara and I hadn't had dinner before the meeting... after finally finishing, we celebrated with a quick Taco Bell meal. :)
So our first offer was submitted about 2 weeks ago, and at first the seller was not interested in negotiating - their counter offer was complete crap and they only dropped their price $3K (less than half a percent of the asking price). The selling agent actually wrote us a letter imploring us to not be insulted by the seller's counter and that the seller is the CEO of a large company and that it's just about numbers for the seller, there are no emotions involved. We countered again, and then we didn't hear anything for over two days. Offers all have 2 day expirations here and the seller never got back to us within the expiration deadlines for any of our communications, which really upset Sara and I - it felt like they were jerking us around. Finally their agent called our agent and told us the seller would counter - once again the counter would be utter crap, but they actually never sent us an official counter offer. A week passed without any communication from them, so Sara and I had basically given up and started up our search again.
Then on Wednesday, out of the blue, our agent called and said they accepted our last offer. :) Talk about a HUGE surprise, especially considering we had already emotionally divorced ourselves from that unit!
The unit is a loft condo. It's only one bedroom, however it's 1220 square feet in size, so there's plenty of room and we plan to create a second bedroom area. The MLS listing does not have any pics from this unit, so here's a shot of the oustide of the building:
 A good looking building, if I do say so myself |
I'll be posting some pics of the place soon.
We'll take posession in mid November... the unit is right downtown, walking distance to all the major attractions. And with 1200 s.f., there'll be lots of room to house everybody. Who's coming to visit first???