Sold!

Wednesday, 29 Mar 2006 | Leaving the Netherlands

A few minutes ago I got a call from my real estate agent. My condominium has been sold! It was a nerve-racking process, but kudos to Oscar for having balls of steel in the negotiations.

The Amsterdam real-estate market is not red hot at all and so the condo was expected to sell in between 6-16 weeks. I was lucky in that the second couple to see it, really wanted it and so made an offer right away. What followed over the course of yesterday and today were negotiations that for me were nerve-wracking. But I had a really good agent who got me an awesome deal. It was on the market for exactly one week. Being the nerd that I am, in the graph below you can see the way they went - the top of the graph being what I asked and the bottom is what I expected to get. The lower offers are obviously theirs and the higher counters are mine. So yeah, the first offer they made was exactly what I expected to actually get, I’m glad I didn’t accept that one right away.

You can undoubtedly imagine how happy I am with this result, especially now that I will make a little money out of this sale too - which I was not expecting to do at all. I have a lot of expenses coming my way and so the added savings are very welcome. There is a theoretical chance that the deal will fall through if they can’t get financing together, but that was unlikely according to their agent.

I’ll move out in a little over six weeks I think (it might be 8 weeks), so I have my work cut out for me. It’s going to be weird selling and packing most of my stuff so long before my actual moving. I also have yet to figure out what I’ll do for a roof over my head in the last 3 months in Holland, but we’ll see I guess.

But for now, I’m going to sit back and enjoy this moment for a bit.