Take a load off, Fannie

If you were wondering, I'm responsible for the housing mess. Sorry about that.

Right now, I'm sitting on a box filled with the proceeds of selling our last house. It's not a particularly big box, mind you, but it is filled with money. (Note to newspaper-reading burglars: It's not an actual box. It's a metaphorical box. Surrounded by real-enough dogs.) Still, metaphorical or not, nobody seems to want our box, or the money in it.

At some time during the Summer of Confusion 2010, we sold our house. Yes, we were the ones. Given how difficult the real estate market is, few sellers are taking offers contingent on another sale. We certainly weren't. But the downside of such wariness is that when your house sells, you've got to find a place lickety-split.

And so we started looking.

But there were few places in the Suffolk neighborhoods we wanted to live in, at a price we could reasonably pay. One of the only real possibilities was in foreclosure. Owned by Fannie Mae.

And that's where things get unpleasant.

Short deadlines and the federal government go together as well as gasoline and a monkey with a flamethrower. Sure, it might be funny, but everyone ends up crying. And on fire.

We made an offer for considerably less than the asking price, which is what you do unless you like paying more than something is worth. According to Fannie's own rules, we were then supposed to talk to each other to negotiate an actual price.

Except Fannie didn't want to do it that way. She wanted us to resubmit every piece of paper again, but with one digit changed. I think she was punishing us. Hard.

Our agent did as Fannie asked. We'd raise our offer by a few thousand dollars, that offer would get sent to Richmond, and it would disappear until we started asking what had happened to it. If Fannie would answer the phone. Or could get her e-mail working.

With each offer, our own closing date would - well - close. Finally, after we'd gone back and forth a few times, each time begging Fannie to just talk to us, she said she was tired of talking. She wanted our best offer. Which we sent into the black hole that was her expectations. And which she promptly lost.

Eventually, we ran out of time. We had to move. We found a rental.

So far, it's a familiar story. Incompetent government works against its own interests and the interests of taxpayers.

Except.

A month later, Fannie wrote again, wondering why we weren't interested in the house anymore. She sent a blank contract. We decided that we were interested, just a little. We trimmed several thousand dollars off our original offer because of inconvenience and vexation (and a softening market).

Fannie rejected it. Then she lowered the asking price by 15 percent without telling us. At this point, we're pretty sure she was just being cruel. We countered once more, mustering all our patience to avoid cutting our offer again.

And then Fannie, as she did so many times, disappeared. Eventually, after we called and called, she told us she'd picked another family to buy her house.

I can't say I blame her, or that I was really surprised. At the end, we didn't care that much because we were so apoplectic. But here's the thing. Our frustration and disappointment don't matter. Results do.

Chances are, when the dust clears, that Fannie will have sold this house for less than she could've gotten from us. Perhaps less than we offered one of the 400 times she made us counter. It's possible we'll never really know. We will, however, know this: We'd have to be living in a gasoline-soaked refrigerator box at the business end of a monkey-wielded flamethrower to ever want to deal with Fannie Mae again.

Given the market, I'd like to apologize for that. From what I can tell, we are not alone in our experience with the federal mortgage lender. Which wouldn't matter, except that she owns a huge number of the foreclosed houses in all our neighborhoods.

That's too bad. The housing market can't entirely recover until all the foreclosures stop dragging down real estate prices. The foreclosures won't be gone until the banks sell them. All the banks won't sell them, apparently, until we stop trying to buy them. Which is a problem, since I've got a box of money but no place to call home.

Donald Luzzatto is editorial page editor at The Pilot. E-mail: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.