FIVE HOUSES

Phew.  We're done.  We now own FIVE houses – two of them on the same street, which for some reason absolutely thrills Rob.  Funny guy.  This was not an easy purchase at all, and I think that it will continue to get more complex as time goes by.

 

First off we ended up getting CMHC approval on the property, much to our surprise!  Probably because it was ridiculously cheap.  But either way, our rate is fantastic, 3.69% fixed over 5 years.  On the last day before conditions had to be removed we find out that CMHC is requiring an appraisal be done on the property because IT IS TOO CHEAP.  Shouldn't they be happy about that?  But they are worried that they may be insuring a mortgage on a pile of crap, so they need an appraisal.  Bah.  Of course the appraiser we hire tells them exactly what they want to hear, but too slowly.  SO we actually lifted the conditions (bought it with or without financing) BEFORE we knew for sure that we had a mortgage.  That was exciting.

 

Then, because the appraisal said that the house had been converted to 3 living units, CMHC made it conditional that the zoning be legal.  YIKES.  So not the case.  It is a legal property under the fire code, but the zoning hadn't been changed from single family.  It took us two weeks and a lot of finagling to get that condition removed…they ended up accepting that we could rent the house out as a single family.  Again, they are just getting what they want to hear…anyone with a brain would know that we are going to rent it out as a triplex.

 

Finally it looked like we were all a go…conditions met, income letters provided, commitment signed.  And then nothing.  No word from the bank.  Our little underwriter, Kaylee (or twit as I like to call her), completely dropped the ball.  They took ages to turn anything around, asked for the same stuff more than once, lost things, forgot to write stuff down (for instance, they needed to actually speak to my boss but then when they did it wasn't recorded and then they asked me again the day before closing to speak to my boss.  NO.).  Needless to say, closing day arrived and still no mortgage instructions.

 

Our broker was on the ball though and browbeat the bank into settling their crap and getting it done.  I got the keys at 4:45 on closing day…talk about down to the wire! Yikes!  But it's finished, phew.