House Building 101

We jumped in and never looked back. House buying is probably one of the biggest decisions we ever made in our lives and while it has taken us tons of sleepless nights, number crunching, research, after research, after research - our efforts were rewarded with an answer.

The date was April 1st, 2007 - and there's no foolin' around then. One full quarter after we started looking around, we signed our life away on April Fools Day. lol.

As our house was a spec home {meaning, this was a house that's pre-selected by the builder; it's a marketing strategy of many home builders for (1) early move-in/possession; (2) to give their client base an easier way to "get in" the market as some selections were already made as opposed to building everything (and choosing everything) by the client.} - the exterior elevation (facade in our normal lingo), the colours of the exterior, and the cabinetry were already chosen by them - Heartland (our builder) has already a dugged hole by the time we signed in.

In many cases, the 'digging' of the hole can sometimes take awhile (usually from 2-3 months) so we were quite lucky with the fact that there's already a 'hole' (this would be the foundation/basement) by the time we gave the initial deposit. We were given 2 weeks to process our mortgage papers for removal of conditions.

At this point, we decided to change contact persons for our mortgage. The first one who we talked to was not the most helpful - and frankly, not the most competent one in my books. He seemed quite disinterested with our business - and although he kept harping on how great our credit histories were and how impeccable our 'records' were, he just didn't seem to 'hear' what we wanted. We held off signing our papers (this was sometime in late Feb to early March) and sat on the fence for a while.

Finally, after two weeks, as if it's in the stars - the person who introduced us to this first broker decided to leave our firm - therefore, it somehow pointed us to a different direction. Enter P - who was part of our team in the firm and who we did NOT know was a mortgage broker! HELLO!!!

P helped us put together our financial documents. It was so swift, we were done before the deadline. Now, that's customer service!!!