Becoming a homeowner in Brooklyn Part 5
May 12, 2014
Finding our new home.
Weeks after we lost the apartment of our dreams in a bidding war, that we were told involved about 15 people, we saw another similar apartment on Streeteasy. It was about the same size 1000 sq ft-ish and in the same area (Windsor Terrace/Kensington). This one was on the market for just under $500,000. The difference, besides the price being more was that the place needed some updates. Old kitchen, old bathroom, old electric. Needless to say the open house wasn’t as swamped as the last and we knew we’d have less competition. And we knew it had potential and decided we wanted to put an offer on it, but not for the price they were asking since we’d also need to shell out money on renovations. We offered about 20,000 less than asking. After a few nail biting days they came back with a counter offer and met us in the middle. We said okay and our offer was officially accepted!!!
All of this being said, after reading so many articles about home buying in New York City and with advice from Victoria, we knew not to get too comfortable. Offers are often accepted just to be unaccepted because a higher bidder comes in late in the process. So we waited for this to potentially happen. As days went by we felt a bit more comfortable, then a week went by and we felt more comfortable still but I wasn’t going to feel completely at ease until we’d inspected the place and signed that sales contract. That was definitely something I learned in this process. Expect surprises and try very hard not to get your hopes up about anything. With a few bumps in the path to signing the sales contract, which I’ll discuss in next weeks post, we signed the sales contract and felt like we could finally start getting excited about our new home. Still not too excited until those keys are in our hands but we let ourselves celebrate a little.