A Headlong Leap.

Deciding to take a chance, we contacted our Realtor here in Pocatello, Jared, who found us a Realtor out in the area, contacted her and let her know we were interested. The first thing we were surprised to discover, is that a lot of Realtors move at a glacial pace. Jared, and everyone we'd dealt with previously at our local business have been energetic, friendly, up with the latest tech, and just absolutely amazing to work with, and we'd assumed the same would be the case in Washington. Apparently, email is something fairly foreign there. If we wanted to get ahold of our new Realtor, Mabel (Name changed) we found ourselves needing to call, and usually leave a message a couple of times, and the listing agent for the Motel was even worse, often deleting emails unread. It seemed odd to us that a tool like the internet and email would be so quickly discounted out of hand by these Realtors!

At any rate, we dove in, asking to see occupancy data, and asking the usual questions; days on market, date built, why the owners were selling, etc... Some of the information came back quickly, and the rest would never really be answered...

It turned out, the owner who had the same name as our Realtor, Mabel, was very ill, and that was why they were selling, and had been trying to sell for almost 2 years. They has bought it for her to run, and shortly thereafter, she fell ill and they hired a manager to live in, and run the place. This made us excited, adding fuel to the fire. They seemed desperate to sell, no longer ran the place, and had been trying to sell for quite some time! They were also willing to carry the loan, something very favorable to us, while we have good credit, we didn't have any real money for a down payment. Somehow, in the excitement, we kind of overlooked the lack of any occupancy data, income numbers, or any real effort on the part of the Realtors or owners. We realized that we had a few days off together in a few weeks, and asked Mabel to get us the data while we planned to come out and visit the property...