When Peter Grant and his fiance, Ruan Riggs, began the search for their first home in May, they felt the pressure to find something quickly. Renting in Arlington, they needed a place with an extra room to serve as a nursery for their firstborn child due to arrive in December.
Things did not go exactly as planned. The young couple put down seven offers before finding their new home — a three-bedroom town house in Sterling.
“We lost three in Reston and two in Herndon,” said Grant, who works as a sales director in Reston. “We kept getting shot down.”
Facing low inventory, fierce competition and bidding wars, the couple found themselves at a disadvantage with Federal Housing Administration financing. While it’s favorable to the buyer, with low interest rates and money up front, FHA financing can influence the seller to reject an offer because there are more stringent requirements concerning the condition of the home and appraisals. In the end, this could mean less money for the seller.
“It was extremely frustrating. We began to get discouraged,” Grant said. “We’d walk into a place and see six or seven business cards on the counter and feel like we didn’t have a chance.”
A native New Yorker, Grant persisted.
“I was online every night and homes were disappearing,” he said. “We’d see a place on Thursday and put in an offer — I was putting in offers left and right.”
Demand was increasing and the number of available homes was diminishing — values were going up, and all the properties had multiple contracts on them, sometimes as many as six. When the three-bedroom town house in Sterling with a deck in a nice neighborhood went on the market, they did not get their hopes up.
“I was wary all the way through to the end of settlement,” he said. They moved in at the end of July. A friend at SunTrust Bank helped push the paperwork through, and the couple closed in two weeks.
“I let out a very big sigh of relief after the appraisal came back, because that’s how they lost the first property they wrote an offer on,” said their agent, Danilo Bogdanovic of Market Advantage. “Though I’m happy for all of my clients, I was especially happy for them because their story and experience was one of the toughest mentally on a buyer, out of most buyers I’ve ever worked with.”
The couple love their new home — especially the location, which is within walking distance of a Bloom grocery store, and the open floor plan.
“We send texts to each other from work about how much we miss not being in the new house,” Grant said. “It feels like home.”
