Selling Our House...and Buying Another

Selling Our House...and Buying Another In December 2011, we decided to movc from Capitol Hill in Washington, DC to northern Virginia. For the past ycar-and-a-half, our daughter had attended a DC public school (DC offers all-day pre-K classes). Unfortunately, we did not have faith that the school system would provide her with a high-quality education. This graphic shows the stressful process of selling one home while simultancously purchasing another by tracking the daily email traffic between us and our rcaltor and lender, and the daily number of documents sent. Why are we moving? In a Word: Schools. Emails to Realtor Emails to Lender Emailed Documents* Test scores are surely not the only (or best) metric of what differentiates good schools from bad schools; however, as one January January January objective measure, the percentage of students who were proficient (according to No Child Left Behind test scores) in our DC Friday, February 10 Storage POD delivered February February February school and those in our destination clementary school in VA differed by over 40 percentage points. Tuesday, March 6 Offer made, VA house March March March 6 12 Reading Math 95% 97% Sunday, March 11 DC Open House 46% 52% Thursday, March 29 VA house signed (closing set for May 7) Friday, March 30 DC house signed (closing set for May 9) Friday, March 9 Tuesday, March 20 Offer received,** DC house Thursday, March 22 --Inspection, DC house Wednesday, March 21 Inspection, VA house Locked in a 30-year, 4% fixed rate loan. Rates begin to rise a couple weeks later. . DC school VA school .. Author: Jonathan Schwabish [email protected], @jschwabish * Refers to actual files scanned and emailed, not the number of forms within each email. (Scores not adjusted for demographics.)