Boy, am I glad we didn’t buy a house. We’d been looking since August and were scrambling to beat the first-time home buyer’s tax credit deadline of Nov. 31st. For the record, it takes 30 days to close on a house in the best of circumstances, but the average is closer to 45-60 days. Just before Halloween we found out that my wife would be losing her job at the end of the year.

A couple of days before we found out this distressful bit of info, our realtor brought to my attention that we’d been shown 137 houses in three months. We’d made five offers, all of which had fallen through in negotiations. Her tone conveyed that we were running out of options if we wanted to beat the deadline.

Negotiations. If there was anything during these hard times I’d heard over most of 2009 with regard to home buying, it was: “It’s a buyer’s market”. “If a seller can’t pay your closing costs then they’re being unreasonable”. “NO ONE pays list price on a house nowadays”. None of these suggestions came directly from our realtor, but she also didn’t disagree with them. And so we approached our offers with these jewels of advice in mind.

It just never worked out the way we heard that it would. On two of the houses, the sellers were insulted by our offers of a few thousand below list and closing costs – so incredibly insulted that they considered not even counter-offering. Hey, we were just entering the negotiations expecting the seller to counteroffer, not trying to low ball them. But on all of the five houses, there was just no compromise. We’d been told that paying list price was just ridiculous, yet any time we entered negotiations the sellers seemed unwilling to come much off their list price even if their home had been on the market for 30, 60, 90 or 180 days!

I’m so glad we didn’t jump into a mortgage just to beat some deadline. Was our negative first-time home buyer experience in this economy just a result of an unfortunate series of unreasonable sellers? Or was word of mouth wrong about it being a “buyer’s market”?