Friday, January 16, 2009

History Lesson

To make a very long story short, we are refinancing our house and taking advantage of the super low interest rates and in the process we have had to locate all sorts of paperwork needed to fulfill the application. I had to find the deed to the house as well as our abstract. Not knowing what either looked like I searched and searched and finally found the deed, but no abstract. In a panic I spoke with our loan officer who also happens to be the parent of one of my students. So she and I did some detective work and finally found out that Roland and I were never given our abstract when we bought the house and that in fact it was at a title company in SYR. The company agreed to FedEx it to us and one day later it was in our hands. Thank goodness.

Here is where my story gets interesting... I looked through it and found out all sorts of interesting information about our house. Here are a few of the details...

* It was built in 1923 and the first owners bought it for $4000
* There have been 5 owners before us.
* The longest that a family occupied it was from 1968-1997 (29 years)
* The people who bought it in 1968 paid $14,500.00 and sold it for $61,500.00 in 1997. That is a HUGE profit as I'm sure it was paid for.
* The woman who we bought it from in 2002 made $22,000.00 for only living in it from 1997 until we bought it in 2002.

There were many other interesting facts that I won't bore you with, but I found it fascinating to read through. I only wish that there was an original floor plan/design so we could see what it originally looked like and what has been added on over the years now. So there is a little part of the history of our house! Let's see if our family can beat the 29 year record for living in it. 7 years down and many more to go...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't the housing market crazy?! We sold our house last year for $60,000 more than we bought it just 5 years earlier. Of course, houses get more expensive every year, so it wasn't as much of a profit as it sounds like.

Sarah Richards said...

That's cool! Our house had a lot more owners than 5...I can't remember how many but it was a ton!