Margot’s First Home: A New Chapter Begins

Lauren and I bought this home—our new primary residence. It was fun to go through this transaction for ourselves, and it helped build empathy for our clients. Over the past year, we developed a very specific set of criteria for what we wanted our next house to be.

We walked through about 50 homes total to refine that list. We were looking for a home with 4 or more bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, no pool, parking for a boat, remodeled interior, a big yard for the dog and kid(s), within 5 minutes of Lifetime or the freeway, serviced by Roseville utility or solar, and priced under $950K.

Homes that fit this list seldom came up, but about once a month, one would be listed—and often sell very quickly. Once we had officially sold our previous house, we scanned the MLS every day. We made an offer a week prior to this one being listed, but the inspection reports had a lot of red flags, and it just didn’t quite feel right.

Then this house was listed—on Thursday at 8 p.m. When I saw it before bed, I knew it was the one. Scanning through the photos and satellite view, it checked all the boxes. It even checked many of our nice-to-have boxes as well: walking distance to school and park, a view, cul-de-sac location, and $100K under our max budget. We scheduled a showing right away for the next morning.

At 9 a.m., we saw the house. Our feeling was confirmed, and we wrote an offer on the spot—in the kitchen. Our offer was as clean as possible, and we did many little tricks to make it more attractive without increasing our price above asking.

We offered a 20-day escrow, a 2% deposit, credited our commission to our closing costs, included a $10K appraisal gap, added a 10-day inspection contingency, and waived the home warranty. We also put a 24-hour expiration deadline with an NDA in our offer. This made the seller respond quickly, without shopping our offer to other buyers.

We were in contract by Saturday morning—before they had a chance to host an open house. I’d like to think we created a win-win situation for both buyer and seller.

The sellers did a great job remodeling the house, so there were no issues during inspections, and we closed right on time.

Now our 6-week-old daughter Margot has a beautiful new home to grow up in—with Stella (our dog) and hopefully more siblings to come.