Um, so yeah....
Aug. 15th, 2010 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clarentineWe were buying this farm - 43 acres, hundred-year-old farmhouse. And then the banks told us they'd changed the rules, without bothering to tell us. (This after we'd moved in on a caretaker basis, since the former owners had bought a house in town and needed someone to oversee the remaining livestock, and after we'd actually managed to close on the house we had to sell in town. Let's hear it for actually having managed to sell!)
The banks didn't tell us all at once there was a problem, either. The first bank was happy to give us a preapproval letter, since one of the first things we'd done when we knew we were headed down this road was to pay off all but a tiny portion of our consumer credit. Our credit is positively shimmering. Instead of telling us there was an issue, bank #1 (one of only two we knew of that were open to loans on more than ten acres) tells us Oh, by the way, we've decided that we're no longer going to finance larger properties.
So we switched to bank #2. Their incredibly helpful loan officer actually came out to the house since P couldn't go out (post-knee replacement surgery, homebound). She also was the first one to flag the real problem: not that we didn't make enough (we do, but we knew that), or that our credit was less than sterling (nope), but that by underwriters' rules the house to land ratio was off. Seriously off.
See, here's the thing: land around here is going for about $4,000 an acre. There are 43 acres in this parcel. The house is old and not in the best shape (though really well maintained mechanically, the siding in several places has passed old and gone straight to rotted, and the whole place needs a serious paint job once the siding boards are replaced). In short, the house is worth about half what the land is currently assessed at.
The underwriters' formula is that land value for a property should not exceed 40% of the total value of the loan.
The former owner has a first mortgage (refinanced in 2003), a second mortgage, and a building loan. Let's just say they owe about what they were asking of us, which is a good bit more than the underwriters would permit to be balanced by the house's value. Which means that the former owner cannot even slice off the appropriate portion of land and sell us that with the house, because they would not be able to pay off their mortgages and would not be able to transfer title.
The evening I got that news - delivered to me on the phone late on a Friday evening, by the kind lady loan officer, who had not wanted to sit on the bad news and who assured me she was going to see what else there might be available - left me sitting at the table, staring at the wall. I hadn't seen that coming at all.
The underwriters would be able to write the sort of loan usually used for farmland, what they call a "portfolio loan," but in order to do that we'd have to bring a down payment of 20% to closing. We had only about half that figure; while we had successfully closed on the house in town by that point, we had not cleared as much from the sale as I'd have liked. (I need to remember here to be grateful that we closed at all, about two months from putting the house on the market.)
Check and mate. We called the former owners and gave them the bad news, and now we are back to looking for land and a house.
I'm still uploading them, but there are some photos of the current front-runner up on my Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/8556491@N07/). I'll probably try to upload the rest overnight while everyone else's computers are asleep, which means the photos won't get descriptions until tomorrow, but you'll be able to see what we looked at. (There were actually four houses on today's tour, but two were definite Nos and the third was only a Meh, so I didn't bother taking photos.) We're planning to go out again next weekend to look at some others.
***
The cucumbers have kicked the bucket; after the fall rains started two weeks ago, they fell quick victim to fungi and are now a crunchy, dusty white tracery of what had been vines and leaves. One tomato - the Yellow Pear; I really need to stop trying to grow that variety - is also down for the count, this one a month before the rain started, probably to anthracnose or something like that, given the progression of disease up the stems. Four other tomato varieties are still going strong, one of them a volunteer from the composted hen house duff I spread in the garden beds. The grape tomato in particular is really excellent, and I've got a jar of split fruit, pulped and watered, fermenting in the hen house as a first step to saving seeds for next year. Most grape tomatoes are still open-pollinated, rather than hybrids, and so should come true from those seeds. I hope!
The red Italian bull's horn peppers have been producing sweet, thin-walled fruit for about three weeks. They're not getting eaten as fast as they're ripening, so a lot of them are getting sliced and put into the freezer for winter cooking. I picked the first of the banana peppers this morning; T says it tasted like an ordinary bell pepper, so I doubt I'll bother with them next year (looooong time to harvest).
The bush beans suffered while the drought's hot, dry winds blasted the garden area. They flowered, but no beans ever appeared. We've finally begun seeing actual beans now that the rains have begun, though not in any numbers; I've picked less than a dozen in two weeks. As many plants as I have, I should be getting a dozen a day.
The chickens' production picked back up once the rains started, too, coincidentally about the same time they finished moulting. I'm getting about a dozen eggs every two days (seven one day, five the next, pretty regularly). I expect that number to go up as the weather cools further.
***
I suppose it's just as well that we had not given away most of the boxes we used to move here. Really, though, I'd have preferred not to need those boxes again.
The banks didn't tell us all at once there was a problem, either. The first bank was happy to give us a preapproval letter, since one of the first things we'd done when we knew we were headed down this road was to pay off all but a tiny portion of our consumer credit. Our credit is positively shimmering. Instead of telling us there was an issue, bank #1 (one of only two we knew of that were open to loans on more than ten acres) tells us Oh, by the way, we've decided that we're no longer going to finance larger properties.
So we switched to bank #2. Their incredibly helpful loan officer actually came out to the house since P couldn't go out (post-knee replacement surgery, homebound). She also was the first one to flag the real problem: not that we didn't make enough (we do, but we knew that), or that our credit was less than sterling (nope), but that by underwriters' rules the house to land ratio was off. Seriously off.
See, here's the thing: land around here is going for about $4,000 an acre. There are 43 acres in this parcel. The house is old and not in the best shape (though really well maintained mechanically, the siding in several places has passed old and gone straight to rotted, and the whole place needs a serious paint job once the siding boards are replaced). In short, the house is worth about half what the land is currently assessed at.
The underwriters' formula is that land value for a property should not exceed 40% of the total value of the loan.
The former owner has a first mortgage (refinanced in 2003), a second mortgage, and a building loan. Let's just say they owe about what they were asking of us, which is a good bit more than the underwriters would permit to be balanced by the house's value. Which means that the former owner cannot even slice off the appropriate portion of land and sell us that with the house, because they would not be able to pay off their mortgages and would not be able to transfer title.
The evening I got that news - delivered to me on the phone late on a Friday evening, by the kind lady loan officer, who had not wanted to sit on the bad news and who assured me she was going to see what else there might be available - left me sitting at the table, staring at the wall. I hadn't seen that coming at all.
The underwriters would be able to write the sort of loan usually used for farmland, what they call a "portfolio loan," but in order to do that we'd have to bring a down payment of 20% to closing. We had only about half that figure; while we had successfully closed on the house in town by that point, we had not cleared as much from the sale as I'd have liked. (I need to remember here to be grateful that we closed at all, about two months from putting the house on the market.)
Check and mate. We called the former owners and gave them the bad news, and now we are back to looking for land and a house.
I'm still uploading them, but there are some photos of the current front-runner up on my Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/8556491@N07/). I'll probably try to upload the rest overnight while everyone else's computers are asleep, which means the photos won't get descriptions until tomorrow, but you'll be able to see what we looked at. (There were actually four houses on today's tour, but two were definite Nos and the third was only a Meh, so I didn't bother taking photos.) We're planning to go out again next weekend to look at some others.
***
The cucumbers have kicked the bucket; after the fall rains started two weeks ago, they fell quick victim to fungi and are now a crunchy, dusty white tracery of what had been vines and leaves. One tomato - the Yellow Pear; I really need to stop trying to grow that variety - is also down for the count, this one a month before the rain started, probably to anthracnose or something like that, given the progression of disease up the stems. Four other tomato varieties are still going strong, one of them a volunteer from the composted hen house duff I spread in the garden beds. The grape tomato in particular is really excellent, and I've got a jar of split fruit, pulped and watered, fermenting in the hen house as a first step to saving seeds for next year. Most grape tomatoes are still open-pollinated, rather than hybrids, and so should come true from those seeds. I hope!
The red Italian bull's horn peppers have been producing sweet, thin-walled fruit for about three weeks. They're not getting eaten as fast as they're ripening, so a lot of them are getting sliced and put into the freezer for winter cooking. I picked the first of the banana peppers this morning; T says it tasted like an ordinary bell pepper, so I doubt I'll bother with them next year (looooong time to harvest).
The bush beans suffered while the drought's hot, dry winds blasted the garden area. They flowered, but no beans ever appeared. We've finally begun seeing actual beans now that the rains have begun, though not in any numbers; I've picked less than a dozen in two weeks. As many plants as I have, I should be getting a dozen a day.
The chickens' production picked back up once the rains started, too, coincidentally about the same time they finished moulting. I'm getting about a dozen eggs every two days (seven one day, five the next, pretty regularly). I expect that number to go up as the weather cools further.
***
I suppose it's just as well that we had not given away most of the boxes we used to move here. Really, though, I'd have preferred not to need those boxes again.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-16 12:29 pm (UTC)I think we will be happy to bring the cats and the chickens with us, but that's up to the farm's current owners.