Home Buying During A Pandemic, It's Weird
Well this is a strange situation! After over a year of planning to plunge into homeownership in Spring 2020, I really thought we’d considered everything: the pre-approval, the location, the budget, the savings, the credit scores, the accurate reporting our self-employed income, and—of course—the pact with Fox that we’d only buy a house he approved of. Because if you’re not basing massive life decisions on the gut feeling of your seven pound lap dog, well, we’re just not the same.
What we didn’t consider? A pandemic and months of global and personal trauma. But, after a two-month halt to our plan, we decided it was time to move forward with shopping around in a world that suddenly looked entirely different. Why not wait until some time later, you ask? For starters, it looks like we’re going to be in this for a very long time, and “later” might be a year from now. Our lease is ending this summer, we live an hour outside of where we want to live, and we’ve creatively and physically outgrown our current home.
Living our lives and running our little homo lifestyle business out of a small sterile suburban apartment is absolutely possible, but kind of began to feel masochistic once it was no longer our only option, money-wise. If we chose to postpone our home purchase until “later,” our only options were to sign another year long lease, or pay the hyper-inflated month to month rent, which feels like a step away from our long term goals.
And luckily with Matt and his mom both being licensed Realtors, touring homes is very easy and pretty risk free, and almost all the ones we viewed were totally vacant. Still, masks and gloves have been the norm. Searching for our new home while dressed like we’re going into surgery has been a little jarring.
So what’s the market look like? Honestly we anticipated this being a very buyer-friendly market because, like, who tries to buy a home during economic uncertainty? Definitely only people in super stable careers like blogging (this is a joke). But it turns out that it’s not really... anyone’s market. It’s a market of chaos where the rules change fast and no one really knows what is going on. It appears that new home listings have dropped in New Orleans—probably because most folks do not want to voluntarily sell during a volatile market—and that has made home buyers still in the game act like little piranhas, swarming at the opportunities to feast on big chunks of Hardie plank and outdated kitchen backsplashes.
We are one of those piranhas. Or actually, we are two of those piranhas. And being one day late to the feast was how we missed out on the first home we fell in love with earlier in May! It was a true arts and crafts cottage in our first choice neighborhood that had a perfect backyard with a pergola, room for us to park our camper Rosie, and a detached finished shed that would be the ideal office/ photo studio/ wine storage/ catchall functional space. Our mistake was getting too hung up on the kitchen layout. We couldn’t figure out what we could do to the kitchen to make it work for us, so we went home and slept on it. Two days later we came up with a perfect plan to fix our issues with the kitchen, went to submit an offer, and found out some other piranha had already come and snatched it up. I’m gonna end the piranha analogy here because it’s weird.
We still wrote a backup offer that was accepted and we even got the feeling the seller preferred the first deal to fall through and sell to us, but it was too late for the seller to have a preference; they were under contract and the choice to back out belonged entirely to the first buyer. The inspection period neared to a close and we held onto hope that the first buyer would back out, scared away by the numerous issues we knew the house had—we’re the kind of people who are actually looking for homes to have problems because we want the opportunity to fix them! But we were pretty devastated to find out it was going to sale as planned. We moped around for a few days about it, lit a few candles and asked the universe to kindly let the first deal fall through, which is honestly super rude of us but I’m not going to lie to you about it. But, the deal didn’t fall through, and turns out it’s for the better because there’s another home we love even more that caught us completely by surprise because it was unlike anything we thought we wanted. More on that house later.
Anyway the lesson here for home buying is this: if you have a really good gut feeling about a house, but there’s some small hangup that you can’t quite figure out… our advice? Take the plunge and make an offer, and attempt to figure out the hangup during inspections once you’re under contract. Something inevitably will come up in the inspections and allow you to walk away scot-free if you want, but if you wait and let someone else snatch up the house in the meantime, you never really get the chance.
That said, we’re sort of glad we made the mistake of not jumping. We’re now under contract on a different place that we couldn’t be more excited about. We’re already filling Pinterest boards with design ideas and inspiration, and I think it’s going to end up being a really great summer indoors, planning and decorating our new space, which I’m feeling very lucky and grateful for.
Fingers crossed!
xoxo Beau & Matt