HGTV Give Away. It's Your Last Chance.

Today is your last chance to enter to win HGTV's Dream Home 2010. It's a beautiful house in New Mexico. The house comes with a car and $500,000. Not too shabby. Paul and I entered. You should too: http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv-dream-home-2010-giveaway/package/index.html

If you win, don't forget you heard about it from me ;)

Virgin Islands Real Estate Drama: Rosemary Sauter

I guess I should mention this since I want this blog to include some discussion of real estate issues in the Virgin Islands. The island is a buzz with news of Rosemary Sauter, owner of ReMax Dream Properties on St. Thomas. Well, as of right now, ReMax Dream Properties is closed and Rosemary Sauter is missing in action. A warrant has been issued for her arrest. She is suspected with stealing more than $1 million from escrow accounts and having bounced checks. This means that a lot of people, renting out properties managed by ReMax Dream Properties or planning on purchasing homes, may have lost money. It’s a very sad story.

Paul and I were going to put an offer in on a house just before this happened (Yes, this home building process is very stressful and taking way too long). At the time, I thought we weren’t very lucky since the house went under contract the same day we were going to put in an offer on the house. Looking back on it now, we were very fortunate. We were working with a ReMax real estate agent and had we made an offer we may have lost our earnest money deposit.

To find out more information about this story check out the Virgin Islands Daily News.

Status Report

What’s going on? Well, we are waiting again. This time we are waiting for the contractor. The contractor said that he needs our draftsman to make changes to our plans in order to avoid having to file change orders with the Department of Planning and Natural Resources. This is supposed to save us time and money once we start building. So, we had a meeting with the contractors and our draftsman before we went to New Mexico. The contractors told our draftsman about the changes they want to make. Then one of the contractors said that he would get his draftsman to give our draftsman more information about the changes, within a few days. So, when I got back from New Mexico (about 10 days later), I asked our draftsman if he had started working on the changes and he said no. Wait, just wait. The reason he had not started was because he had not received the information from the contractors' draftsman. Hmmmm. Today, about three weeks later, he still hasn’t gotten the information from the contractors. The contractors say the information will be ready by this Friday (and said the same thing about last Friday and the one before that). So that’s what I’m waiting for.

The most frustrating part about this is that while our draftsman was working on our plans, I asked the contractor if there were any adjustments that needed to be made to the contractors specifications.. The only thing the contractor brought up was the size of the windows and doors.

Paul and I went up to our property yesterday. The road needs to be cleared again. Not sure if we should start working on it soon or wait. Who knows when we will actually break ground!