Buyers on my mind
Over the past year or so, we have spent more time at home than ever before as we prepped the house for the arrival of our first child, Myles Seiki. As we were cleaning the house and preparing the nursery, I began to wonder... What are all of the things that went through our heads when my Wife and I purchased our home back in 2023?
To take you through our thought process, I should first set the stage a bit. It was March 2020 and Covid was officially here. We had just gotten our first puppy in the Fall of 2019 (Maui, a now 50 lb Pomsky - half husky / half pomeranian) in a small 800 square foot apartment in Walnut Creek. Being a puppy, Maui had a ton of energy and we had to take him out often. We lived off Jones Rd. in Walnut Creek along the BART tracks with one sidewalk and everyone and their mother’s out to get exercise (I know you remember the early Covid days and everyone working from home).
After about a year of trying to make our little apartment work for us (puppy and now both working from home), we decided it was time to start exploring our options. Ironically, the interest rates were hovering just above 3% when we started our search in the spring of 2021. I will admit, we got lucky on timing as the catalyst for our home search was finding a backyard for our dog and NOT the interest rates.
After speaking with a couple lenders, we decided to get pre-approved and were pleasantly surprised with our purchasing power. Though we had been looking online for a few months, this was the step we needed to take to make the process feel real and attainable.
It took us at least a month to calibrate to the market. 2021 was a BEAST of a year to try and buy your first home. Properties were flying off the market and going for well over ask. In one example, we toured a home listed at $800,000 and it ended up selling for $1.3m+. Safe to say we kinda dodged a bullet on that one.
After a couple months of touring, we finally found our dream home in a solid neighborhood, close-ish to both of our parents (built in babysitting! This was the plan lol). We ended up submitting an offer pre-emptively and cut off any potential open house competition the week it came on the market. We got crafty and it worked! We absolutely love our home and love it even more now that we have finally updated our bathrooms (also part of the plan when we moved in).
So. Back to why I am writing this post. “What went through my Wife and I’s heads as we went through purchasing our first home?” Here are some of my takeaways:
1) Square Footage matters. When you are renting a 700 - 1,000 square foot, 2 bedroom / 1 bathroom apartment, you don’t want your HOUSE to FEEL the same. After touring a few smaller properties, we realized square footage was important to us. If you are looking for a 3 bd / 2 ba, you ideally want 1,200+ sqft. If you are looking for a 4 bd / 2-3ba, you ideally want 1,600+ sqft. Otherwise, you may find that either the living space or the bedrooms / bathrooms feel small. Try walking a 4 bd / 2 ba, 1,300 sqft home and see how it feels. Yes, having a garage and yard helps, but these are just some benchmarks to keep in mind from my perspective.
2) The 80/10/10 rule. We didn’t quantify things when we bought, but the concept remains the same. You should love 80% of the house, 10% you can change, 10% you can live with. In short, we loved the size, lot, and overall layout of the house. We hated the interior paint colors and that the laundry was in the garage. Easy to change. Lastly, we were a little further than our parents and the freeway than we originally wanted, but we could live with it. Think “Need to have,” “Nice to have,” and “Can’t Have.”
3) Price. We knew where we wanted to be comfortably in terms of our down payment and monthly mortgage payments. It was important to us to stay within our own limits vs. what was available to us. In hindsight, this relieved a lot of stress when I was unexpectedly laid off at Meta through the mass layoffs in 2023.
I am telling our story because I think it resonates with many. The reason we bought was not to get a great deal or even because interest rates were top of mind for us. We bought because the timing of our lives aligned and we were luckily in a position to do so. Sure, we were saving to eventually buy a home, but taking that first step in talking to our lender made it all feasible.
Getting pre-approved is a fairly quick process and it really helped us understand our budget clearly. You never know what you can truly afford until you try!
