Circa 2008-2009: Emotional real estate

I. am. engaged.

So weird. Never saw myself married but I love Samurai and we are great together.

I resorted to local real estate websites and reduced the amount of newspapers I buy. I am just getting fed up of the quality and/or type of property that people are attaching these hefty price tags to. Why are people so greedy? Is it that they only want a certain class of people to own property in this country?

We are now looking at property that we know is worth much less or we know is very undesirable just because we have basically accepted that the real estate industry in this country seems to be some kind of mafia-like/controlled operation. Our weekends plans by now are usually road trips to the many properties we want to view. We have seen and called about so many properties that sometimes I'm calling the same people or making new arrangements to see the same property we saw months before.

Just when things were getting really down, I saw an ad in the classifieds for a half-acre plot in Couva for only $300+. I mentioned it to my mother and what was rare was that the person listing the sale also printed his name with the contact number. You know in Trinidad everybody leaves out as much detail as possible like they don't realise how small the country is and people find out anyway... When I called the guy's name, my mother immediately told me that she knew of him. He was a real estate agent for years and she was shocked he was still in the game. I felt confident then that the sale was legit so I called to arrange a meeting.

I thought the road to this property would never end and when the houses lining the street started to become further and further apart till there were no more houses and only bush at the side of the road, I already started to get disappointed. We finally pulled up to a track which the agent led us into and not too far in, we saw a really nice piece of flat land. Yes, the surrounding properties were vacant except for one or two very basic structures but it was one of the few properties that we believed were really worth it's price so we jumped on it almost immediately. Any plans for our wedding was immediately pushed to the back burner.

The very first thing we found out we should do was get an evaluation of the property done. We went in to a firm close to my work and applied. We had to present the deed and details of the location. This was about 1% or less of the sale price to get this done. It took a few weeks and was valued a little less than what the seller was calling so she brought it down by about $60K which made us even more excited to proceed.

The owner of the land, apparently a friend of the agent, lived overseas so all correspondence was done through him. We visited his home for a copy of the sale agreement and with no agent of our own and very uneducated regarding real estate and the processes involved, we took the contract to one of TTMF's approved legal officers to vet the agreement.

Except for a new minor corrections to the wording, the contract was valid so we signed on the dotted line and wrote a check for 10% down payment of the purchase price. As the agent explained, this down payment is kept in an account until the sale is completed which should usually be around three months after. If either party is unable to uphold their end of the contract it is terminated. If the fault was on the seller to not close before the three month period, the down payment is returned or if the fault is on the potential buyer, the seller keeps the down payment.

We then visited TTMF for our loan application. As we had only three months, we couldn't waste a day. We already knew what we had to present which was pretty much standard such as identification, bank statements, job letters, payslips, etc.

We got the most pleasant and well-informed representative who really broke down the whole process for us. She told us we were more than qualified and saw no reason for any problem or delay with our application, so, we left to wait on TTMF to complete all their paperwork and verify our documentation and their legal advisers to go through all documentation and conditions of the sale.